On the Future of Peer Review in Electronic Scholarly Publishing

Over the last several months, as I\u27ve met with the folks from if:book and with the quite impressive group of academics we pulled together to discuss the possibility of starting an all-electronic scholarly press, I\u27ve spent an awful lot of time thinking and talking about peer review-how it currently functions, why we need it, and how it might be improved. Peer review is extremely important-I want to acknowledge that right up front-but it threatens to become the axle around which all conversations about the future of publishing get wrapped, like Isadora Duncan\u27s scarf, strangling any possible innovations in scholarly communication before they can get launched. In order to move forward with any kind of innovative publishing process, we must solve the peer review problem, but in order to do so, we first have to separate the structure of peer review from the purposes it serves-and we need to be a bit brutally honest with ourselves about those purposes, distinguishing between those purposes we\u27d ideally like peer review to serve and those functions it actually winds up fulfilling