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Restoring the editor function

To move now to the second point raised by the concept of overlay journals, it has been my contention throughout this book that prestige, while a pragmatic and useful ﬁltering mechanism for both assessment and readership purposes, comes with many potentially damaging side effects, both social and economic, when applied at the journal/publisher level. The idea of an overlay journal, in which pre-reviewed material is curated by trusted and respected editors into issues that they feel will be of value for their readers, puts editors at the centre of the system and displaces the purely service function of a publisher.

There are, of course, problems with such a setup. For instance, how is such material to be cited without diluting the version of record? As the provisions currently stand, unless material is strictly delineated from original publications in an issue, it might also fall foul of the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on duplicate publication and/or self-plagiarism. One potential solution is to specify precisely on the cover sheet the original venue of publication while placing the ‘curated’ item in its own separate zone within an issue.

The other advantage of this type of curational setup worth mentioning is that it provides us with a further metric. Pieces that are recurated by high-proﬁle and respected editors are likely to be valuable themselves. This then gives a mark of prestige to an article based not upon the original publication venue or brand but rather upon the academic ‘brand’ of the curating editor. This is already the case, at least partially, with respect to special issues and to edited collections. In this way, the value of different publishers will become perspicacious free of a historical legacy of prestige. It may well be, in this new world, that old publishers really do know best. Indeed, the speciﬁc reach provided by presses with a history of targeted dissemination and trusted brand is fairly clear, even as critiques are mounted of those systems and companies. However, without a shift away from brand at the publisher level being conﬂated with academic quality, rather than with the quality of the production and other aspects with which publishers are concerned, it is impossible to evaluate the ﬁeld fairly. It is, therefore, worth closing this volume with a remark that