Long Live the Curator! Preprints and a Future for Humanities Publishing — G. Geltner

"My colleague Hans van der Maas has recently proclaimed the death of the academic editor and the liberation of the author. The dramatic change in their fortunes, he argues, is due on the one hand to a proliferation of preprint technologies, allowing scholars to upload and stably store works well before their journal debut. On the other, new incentives for using preprints in Plan-S, a major open-access (OA) initiative of several national research foundations in Europe.

No doubt, the gatekeeping function performed by traditional journals is at odds with publishing workflows in which a paper’s public life can start earlier and its dissemination can anticipate formal publication, sometimes significantly. This is beginning to be true even in the arts and humanities, a world so far mostly spared the growing demands of hyper-individualized entrepreneurship and the publish-or-perish frenzy of the natural, engineering and social sciences.

Prestige, habit and paths of least resistance paved (or bought) by the major publishing conglomerates (read: data merchants) may help mitigate that tension for a while, since most OA preprint servers are not yet part of a full publishing process run by non-profit OA journals such as Sci|Post. But greedy publishers’ absurd pricing and their ambivalence towards real OA publishing effectively create a new form of financial gatekeeping, also known as “pay to play”. The future of truly open scholarly communications surely does not reside with them...."