Peer Review Anew: Three Principles and a Case Study in Postpublication Quality Assurance

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, the Internet has enabled new modes of authorship, new forms of open licensing and distribution, and new forms of collaboration and peer production to flourish. But in turn, new anxieties have arisen, especially concerning quality assurance, peer review, reuse, and modification. New innovations are appearing in peer review, endorsement, the measurement of trust, and the understanding of reputation, but without any systematic analysis of the general principles of quality assurance and peer review in this new era. In this paper, we propose a general set of principles for understanding what peer review was in the past and how it should be applied today to different kinds of content and in new platforms for managing quality. The principles stress an analysis not only on the content in materials but also on their context of use. Our focus is on open educational resources, and we present a case study of the open education project Connexions' lens system for quality assurance and review. However, the principles can be applied across multiple levels of knowledge production, including scholarship in engineering and science and reference materials in addition to educational publishing.