The ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded so as to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken (...) up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, again by researchers (pure and applied, including practitioners), for the benefit of the public that funded it – not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry (nor even because there is a burning public desire to read much of it). Hence OA needs to be mandated, by researchers' institutions and funders, for all research. (shrink)

The operative nucleus of peer review processes has largely remained a ‘black box’ to analytical empirical research. There is a lack of direct insights into the communicative machinery of peer review, i.e., into ‘gatekeeping in action’. This article attempts to fill a small part of this huge research gap. It is based on an ethnographic case study about peer review communication in a sociological journal. It looks at the final phase of the peer review process: the decisions taken in the (...) oral communication of editors’ meetings. The article describes this meeting as an instrumented talk, supported by written tools and constrained by necessary procedural outcomes. It analyzes examples of interactive negotiations of manuscripts and, in the end, it discusses the procedural rationality of peer review as a public sphere for professional judgment. (shrink)

This article discusses the future of quality control in an academic publication system that will be largely based on electronic publishing. Information and communication technologies both challenge traditional ways and open remedies for existent problems of present gate-keeping. New forms of ex-ante and of ex-post quality control may partly replace and partly amend peer review, citation indices and quality filters based on the reputation of the publisher. Open peer review, online commenting, rating, access counts and use tracking are evaluated and (...) put in perspective. Refuting the common argument that e-publishing leads to less quality, this paper puts forward scenarios of the future quality control system. Most likely, we shall see mixed systems, combining old and new elements, of different shapes in the different research fields. (shrink)