W(h)ither gatekeeping? Academic publishing and peer review in complex networked systems

Digitalisation, the Internet, open access initiatives, and trends towards multidisciplinary scholarship are affecting academic publishing practices in diverse ways. In this essay I focus on questions, problems and issues of academic “gatekeeping” (the conventional quality assurance role of journal editors and reviewers) that arise in complex networked systems. These include the diminishing likelihood of any peer reviews being “blind”, alternatives to peer review made possible by open access publishing, and the unpredictable emergence (cf. planned production) of knowledge within complex, open systems and networks. I argue that these circumstances require that we reconceptualise academic gatekeeping in terms of facilitating boundary crossings, transgressions and transformations, rather than as policing traditional or arbitrary boundaries and borders.