Ending with Open Access, Beginning with Open Access | The Scholarly Kitchen

"There is something about the term 'post-publication peer review' that doesn’t quite fit. On one hand, post-publication peer review seems inevitable. As more scholarly content moves online (and not just scholarly content), with little or no editorial gatekeeping–or in the case of services like PLOS ONE, a stripped-down form of peer review–, surely there is going to evolve a method of evaluating materials after the fact. On the other hand, is material that appears online without prior editorial review properly called a 'publication'?  And if such a piece elicits comments from people outside a specific field, could such commenters be called, 'peers'? The term 'post-publication peer review' seems like an early and imprecise way of describing something that is just coming into existence, akin to 'horseless carriage' to describe an automobile. But 'horseless carriage' was a good place to start, even if the vehicle was being defined by what it was not (horseless) rather than what it was. As we enter the age of the self-driving car we might ponder the significance that 'self' in this instance refers not to you or me but to a machine ... The notion of post-publication peer review implies a before and after in two senses. First there is the chronology of the original document and the comments upon it (it is, after all post-publication peer review). Second and more importantly there is the implication of two publishing ecosystems, one that went before and one that came after. The one that went before is traditional publishing, which remains the dominant paradigm today. This form of publishing is sometimes called 'toll-access publishing,' a misleading term in that it defines traditional publishing by a single aspect and leaves out, for example, the editorial and marketing dimensions. In contrast to traditional publishing we have open access (OA) publishing, and it is for that paradigm that we need to come up with a better term than 'post-publication peer review.'  This is harder than it sounds because the world of OA publishing is diverse and seems likely to remain diverse for some time. In addition to such distinctions as green vs. gold OA, there is the question of the source of funding, the complication of hybrid publications, and the rights or capabilities that readers–and text-mining machines–have with regard to the content. On top of this is the wide range of editorial practices, some of which are barely distinguishable from those of traditional publishers (and are often operated by these very same publishers) and some of which largely or wholly abrogate the role of editorial gatekeeper. How do we talk about post-publication peer review if we can’t pin down pre-publication peer review? ..."