Scholarly Publishing: Web Changing the Sacred Rite of Peer Review

NYTimes.com: " ... some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience. 'What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,' said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. 'The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.' ..."