1. Question. What is the marginal utility of ‘rigorous peer-review’? Specifically, is the difference in quality between article and a serious draft generally large enough to be worth the investment of time, energy, and stress on the part of all concerned? The alternative to a journal is simply an open archive, with matters of quality & improvement left up to the twin pressures of self-respect and the marketplace of ideas. How well does this work in comparison with the reviewing system now in place? This sounds like the kind of thing that social scientists would study (rigorously) — but, rigor aside, it might be interesting to gather some opinions.

2. Comment. In promotion cases, the publication list is a proxy for impact on the field (itself a proxy for value). With wholesale electronification and effective search engines, impact can be more directly assessed via citation indexing. It strikes me as possible that official use of the humanist hallmark of ‘publication by a major press’ [or other reputable entity] will dwindle as this becomes apparent.

I believe that much of what John is concerned with has already been greatly facilitated by institution-backed services like the University of California’s eScholarship Repository. Marketing and order fulfilment seem to me to be issues unique to for-profit, print publishing. The only real outstanding issues, it seems to me, are (a) providing print copies for those who insist on having them (though something along the lines of BookSurge comes to mind) and (b) establishing a reputation (something Kai and David addressed in their SALT presentation).

In short: yes, it’ll take a little more commitment. But the pay-off for the field will make it more than worth it. If more of us get involved, the work can be more evenly distributed. I for one would much prefer to submit to, and review in a timely fashion for, an open-access journal that makes its content available freely and as soon as it has been accepted for publication. Wouldn’t you?

(It’s been a while since I’ve kept up with Open Access News, but I’ll bet that issues like those that John raises have been discussed there — either that or links to discussions about such issues have been linked to from there. There have also been some relevant discussions relatively recently on LINGUIST List.)

Before anyone decides to do this for phonetics and phonology, they should give long, hard thought to the time commitment. Realistically, getting a journal like this established and running probably means doing no new research for the next five years (unless perhaps one’s institution has a very generous teaching load policy).