Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/69

 Conversely, however, in the absence of other proxy measures, it could be the case that prestige saves departmental time and money in hiring and assessment processes. This could mean that prestige would offset its own potential economic disadvantages through an obviation of the need to reappraise work constantly. It would be incredibly hard to determine empirically what the costs would look like if labour time were needed to compensate for an absence of prestige. However, the situation is serious enough that there are now a number of projects investigating alternative metric systems to appraise quality (‘altmetrics’).8 Such ‘altmetrics’ attempt to shift the focus of quality assessment away from the use of journal or publisher brand name as a signiﬁer of quality. Sometimes these metrics are ﬂawed, though, in that they can be easily gamed. For example, if one uses social media mentions of a work as a measure then there is an extreme risk of populism playing too strong a role and authors can also artiﬁcially inﬂate their reputations through technological cheating (such as creating many fake Twitter accounts etc.).9 As with all quantifying bibliometrics, technological altmetrics are also only adept at measuring downloads and not so good at determining actual use (i.e. reading, assimilation and value). This is to say that, as much as there are problems with prestige as a measure, there are difﬁculties with all proxy measures. This is because if a proxy measure directly indicated the thing itself, it would not be a proxy.

One such alternative metric that could work – although it is notably also bound to a measure of ‘prestige’ for an academic – is the name of an academic editor. This is already more frequently the case for edited collections where far greater emphasis is placed upon the status of the academic editor. A measure of value based upon the academic editor would not only partially militate against some of the economic problems outlined above but also assist with the discoverability and dissemination issues touched upon in my second question. This is because such a shift from journal brand to editor brand would disentangle the proxy measure from a speciﬁc (subscription/ sales-based) economic model. Researchers would still have a proxy measure to ﬁnd material (the name of the editor) but issues of access might be more easily resolved through lowered barriers to entry for new journals or publishers. This could, of course, also have its problems. Respected academic editors might ﬁnd themselves being