Revising Peer Review

Abstract

Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that as online platforms for scholarly publishing foster increasingly fluid means of communication amongst researchers, the principles on which such publishing is founded—including, most crucially, peer review—must become more flexible.

To say that the ground is shifting in scholarly communication today is to deploy a metaphor with resonances beyond the merely rhetorical. Peer review once seemed to be part of the bedrock of the academic enterprise, so deeply foundational to our work processes that movement appeared impossible. Yet many scholars are coming to understand that peer review as we practice it today is less bedrock than landfill. In an earthquake, landfill has a pesky tendency to liquefy; if the ground beneath scholarly communication is indeed shifting, we should consider whether we need more flexible ways of doing things.

I’ve argued at length elsewhere that closed, blind peer review processes work at cross-purposes with open modes of exchange of web-based scholarly communication. In part, it’s a matter of the changing realities of production: the material scarcities of communication in the print era have been replaced by a plenitude that, if anything, threatens to drown us. As a result, rather than focusing our efforts on importing traditional peer review to our new networked communication systems, artificially recreating conditions of scarcity, we need new ways of coping with abundance. In other words, we need filters, rather than gatekeepers; we need peer review to tell us what work we should be paying attention to, rather than what work should be published in the first place.

We need peer review to tell us what work we should be paying attention to, rather than what work should be published in the first place.

The need for such filters arises from the web’s very openness, which is precisely the source of its power as a communication platform. The scholar’s horror that anyone could publish anything online is matched by the network’s delight in that same fact: anyone could publish anything online! New voices can find an audience, new formats and projects can emerge, new ideas can challenge established orthodoxies, without anyone’s permission. There is something potentially transformative at the heart of networked culture’s openness, which helps to explain why so many scholars today are making use of the web for both formal and informal communication with their peers.

But all this openness has of course produced an explosion of content; the proliferation of online material can make it difficult to find our way to the things we should actually be reading. Part of our desire to impose traditional peer review on the web arises from our sense that things that have made their way through that process stand the best possible chance of being important to us. But this raises a key question about the changing nature of “distinction” in the network age. When peer review serves as a gatekeeping process, it enables us to associate the conferral of distinction with the moment of publication. That a book or article has been published means that someone in whom we have placed our trust—though we may not entirely know who that someone is—has decided that it is worthy.

In online communication, the locus of distinction changes fairly dramatically. The mere existence of an article online tells us little, if anything. Instead, distinction is conferred at the moment of reception—when someone we know indicates that the work deserves our attention. This change is crucial. Online, distinction is created not by imprimatur, or by the processes of production, but by the community that participates in the process through which a given text is disseminated and received.

This shift is nothing short of seismic: the very ground for distinction in scholarly work is moving beneath us. In fact, the publishing platforms that we’ve stood upon for decades have never been quite as solid or stable as they may have appeared. As those platforms become increasingly dynamic and mobile, we need to find new systems that use the internet’s very openness to help us determine quality, that promote rather than inhibit innovation, and that can help us understand that balance in a fluid environment is best built through flexibility rather than rigidity.