Open peer review—which gives anyone who’s interested a chance to weigh in on scholarly content before it’s published—just got an institutional boost. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given New York University Press and MediaCommons a $50,000 grant to take a closer look at open, or peer-to-peer (P2P), review, the press announced today. MediaCommons is a digital scholarly network hosted by the NYU Libraries and affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book.

The idea of P2P review has generated a lot of interest in the humanities lately. Last year, for instance, Shakespeare Quarterly tried its first-ever open peer review experiment with a special issue on Shakespeare and new media. That went well enough that the journal decided to try it again, this time with a forthcoming issue on Shakespeare and performance.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. Looks interesting...

Taking all these factors into account, our view is that the prudent stance for policy-makers seeking to promote access in the current environment is likely to be as follows:

• to encourage the use of existing Green infrastructure (whose costs are largely sunk); but to be cautious about pushing for reductions in embargo periods to the point where the sustainability of the underlying publishing model is put at risk.
• in parallel, to work to facilitate a transition to Gold OA (in specific disciplines first) provided that (i) the average level of APCs remain at or below £1,995;43 (ii) the proportion of articles funded through APCs moves broadly in line with global rates; and (iii) mechanisms are in place to ensure that total payments from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence of this transition.

A new study commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), JISC, Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) and the Wellcome Trust, the main conclusion of which feels a bit like a 'protect the status quo' stance (in terms of the underlying way that scholarly communication works). Which is fine. I'd mention the moving of deckchairs on the Titanic but the 'sinking' analogy isn't right... perhaps the dropping of CD prices in HMV (a struggling UK-wide music outlet) is a better analogy? Hmmm... no, that's not quite right either. Academic publishing is a strange market!

It feels like the web should be having a more disruptive impact (on scholarly communication) than it is. I presume that it isn't because the weight of academic inertia - can inertia have a weight? probably not! but anyway... - the weight of academic inertia is too great to overcome and because the associated market isn't open or big enough to see more rapid change?