Academic publishing can free itself from its outdated path dependence by looking to alternative review mechanisms

Path dependence means that a logical decision in the past establishes itself as the norm and leads to a suboptimal system in the present. Benedikt Fecher looks at the case of the QWERTY keyboard and the current system of academic publishing as examples of how outdated processes continue to scale. Many of the historic strengths of print-based publishing are now encumbering. Articles today rarely allow interactivity, PDFs are used instead of more usable formats and underlying data is seldom retrievable.