[GOAL] Has the OA movement over-reacted to challenges on peer review?

[Heather Morrison]

In the early days as many on this list will no doubt remember, open access advocates spent a lot of time defending OA from the ludicrous argument that peer review somehow was dependent on subscription-based publishing. Have we over-reacted, and are we now placing far too much emphasis on the technicalities of peer review? 

This post draws on an example of a journal that is now fully open access and peer reviewed, which emerged from a conference a few decades ago after a 5-year stint as a newsletter, and asks whether we have gone too far in separating the peer-reviewed article from the broader scholarly communication / community of which the article logically forms just one part:
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/12/from-conference-to-newsletter-to-journal-a-challenge-to-the-emphasis-on-peer-review/

I've added two sections to the Research Questions page in the Open Access Directory:
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Research_questions

Open access in the context of scholarly communication and community flows from the challenge to narrow emphasis on peer review described above. There are questions here that might interest historians, anthropologists, or other social scientists.

The open versus private section may engage scholars from a variety of humanities and social sciences; there are interesting theoretical and empirical questions in relation to all of the open movements. 

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca