Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorStephanie L. BudinStephanie L. Budin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHello, Readers!Several months ago an archaelogy colleague posted on one of my listservers that she was growing increasingly opposed to the current system of academic book publication, especially the exclusionary nature of the (sometimes ridiculously) high costs associated with the end product. Knoweledge, she rather rightly asserted, should be open access. As such, she was taking the first step in what she hoped would be a new trend by simply self-publishing her own next book openly on the Web.This struck me as a really bad idea.My first thought was, “How are you going to handle peer review?” Peer review is probably one of the most important aspects of academic publishing, tout court. It helps to assure that one is doing good scholarship, is not missing crucial data, makes sense from different perspectives, and can be appreciated and useful to a knowledgeable mind other than one’s own. Ideally, peer review is double-blind, meaning neither that author nor the reviewer knows the other’s identity. This is what we do in Near Eastern Archaelogy, which is why I, as the editor, frequently have to edit submitted manuscripts to remove the author’s identity from the text (“As I observed in my previous publication (Blah 2021)…”). The double blindness is truly critical: It promotes honesty and objectivity in a field that is, let’s face it, pretty small and where people tend to know each other rather well. And that’s one thing for pottery studies and quite another for, say, glass pigmentation. “Anonymity” is sometimes a polite fiction at best. But the point is: Peer review is necessary, blind peer review is absolutely necessary, and it is really difficult to get (double-)blind peer review when one is self-publishing. Peer review is not the same this as “feedback.”Another issue is the matter of quality control. This falls into two categories. On the one hand there is the simple matter of editing and proofreading. As most of us already know all too well, it is really difficult to proofread one’s own work. Your start reading the content instead of the letters and you wind up with the typos that absolutely, positively were not there when you typed the thing. Typos are sui generis, a gift from everyone’s favorite deity–Loki, god of chaos. One of the things publishers do is get people other that you to proof your text to hunt out as many of those typos as possible. And to point out that this sentence is missing a word or two. And that none of these five references are in your bibliography. And this date is incorrect.On the other hand, the fact that a publisher puts a manuscripts through the various paces of peer review, commentary and correction, proofreading, and just generally being willing to invest time and money in the project contributes to the quality of the book as an academic endeavour as a whole–This Book is a reasonable book about This Topic and is accepted as such by experts in This Field. The publisher is willing to bet/invest money in that fact. This is a far cry from what we get on the World Wide Web, which is free-for-all where good, bad, horrible, and tragically comic can all be found side-by-side. A self-published book on the Web is one more datum thrown into the Internet maelstrom with nothing to attest to its quality except the assurances of the author. At which point we also have to start dealing with matters of author ego…This is not to say that all academic books that go through an academic publisher are good: I’ve read plenty that area not. Publishing houses are businesses and they need to publish what will sell, like any business. Editors and peer reviewers are subject to fads and trends like any other human. Bad scholarship happens, even in well-published books. But with a professionally published book by an academic publisher, I know that more minds went into the publication that did a self-published, pamphlet, or text. I know that someone other that the author had to consider, think about, critique, and approve of this text. Someone other than the author had to be willing to invest time, money, and effort in this text. That this text had to be convincing to someone other than just the author (which brings us back to that matter of author ego…)Yes, I do think that way too many academic book are too expensive, even my own. Authors have no control over this (in case you were curious). But academic books need a process to improve their quality, and to offer some assurance of their quality, and at the moment the current system is the best we got. I would not recommend chucking it just to enter the maelstrom.Stephanie L. Budin, Editor Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 86, Number 1March 2023 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724670 Views: 30Total views on this site Copyright © 2023 by the American Society of Overseas ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.