Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/70

 offered substantial (ﬁnancial) incentives to edit speciﬁc publications, as just one example, so the system is hardly ﬂawless.

Furthermore, continuing this sketch, which forms a part-response to my third question of how quality and prestige interact, peer reviewers are the other important signal of quality that the current system in the humanities somewhat disregards in favour of an accumulation of prestige. Peer review is, in the most basic terms, an expression of endorsement: which academics said that a piece of work was good and worthy of publication. Given that academic reputation is all-important, the fact that this information is very rarely made public leaves much to be desired in terms of a proxy measure for value. There are, of course, practical problems with revealing reviewer identity to which I will return in the pragmatic path that I suggest in Chapter 5, but there is something to be said for a system in which people publicly endorse others’ work, as is done in the marketing blurbs of monographs.10 Going even further, it is curious to think that the pages upon pages of feedback that academics write for one another as part of the review process are discarded after use every year. It is difﬁcult fully to know the bounds that structure a ﬁeld and that determine the forms of knowledge that are producible and valued when so much of the process that shapes that crafting is hidden. It is also extremely hard to map the correlation between quality and prestige when the determinants that built this form of symbolic capital are not available.

Finally, moving away from internal prestige now to think a little about external value conferral (the ‘prestige’ of the university), it also seems plausible to posit that the current sphere of circulation, based on the subscription or commodity-purchase mode, could bear upon the external perception of the university and research in the humanities. It is true that, at present, successful academic publishers are adept at amplifying research in speciﬁc ways.11 The target audience that they can usually help academics reach, however, is other researchers, admittedly the primary group for whom academic research is important. In an overloaded online environment where discovery is a bigger challenge, this function should not be overlooked. That said, compared with the mooted lofty purposes of research in the humanities, this vision is fairly limited, constrained as it is by the subscription/sale model. Indeed, if these disciplines are