Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
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What is the main goal of the podcast and who are the hosts?
Hello everyone and welcome back to the new book seminar. I'm Felipe Santos and today we're gonna talk about what I believe is one of the Biggest challenge of our current information society, which is the democratisation of knowledge and how to make information accessible to as many people as possible. So, for this, I'm gonna be speaking to an old friend of the book, New Books Network, who's Professor Austin Choi Fitzpatrick from the University of San Diego and the University of Nottingham, who is currently working on uh his new book, The Good Drone, what is that is gonna be published with MIT University Press, and that is going through a very interesting uh review process that is open for everyone to contribute and it's also gonna be open access since the first day.
Austin, welcome back to the New Books Network.
Yeah, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.
So um in your book The Good Drone, you basically speak about um democratizing the sky and also democratizing surveillance, but with this book you're also making lots of efforts, so you contribute to democratizing knowledge as well. Um can you tell us a bit about how you're doing this?
Yeah, thanks for thanks for asking. I'm excited about this process. Um, I guess maybe the the germ the seed, the yeast for this idea first came when I I was working on a chapter and I was thinking about, you know, as you've said, democratizing the sky and I was thinking like what are the metaphors we use for the sky? So I so I did what I did with m several sections of this book is I crowdsourced it, you know. I I I rely rely on Wikipedia like lots of other academics do, but don't don't mention this. But I also went on Twitter and Facebook and I asked my networks, hey, like you know, what are metaphors for the sky? And people gave me all these rich ideas and I use them in the book, sort of like op you know, like democratizing the the data gathering process by asking questions on Twitter, asking questions on Facebook.
And then I wrote the book though, largely in this like cloistered environment. I sit in my office and I write and I get these long stretches of time to myself and I produce this knowledge and then it goes out to peer review and it comes back and I make some changes. I get a book contract. Um and that but that process is really a a fairly solitary, solitary process of writing a book, even though I did, you know, ask people for their advice online. So I thought, how can I actually like make this book? in terms of its output and its process as open as possible. Because I think that one of the wonderful and amazing things about new technology, something they write about in the book, is that it democratizes um lots of the stuff it touches or it creates the opportunity to democratize s these spaces.
It doesn't always. We have to like act on purpose in order for these things to be uh to have pro-social processes and and ends. So what I've done to answer your question is I've opened the book up to an open review process with the group called PubPub, which is a subsidiary of MIT Press. And this allows anybody in the world to go to do essentially a peer-to-peer review of my book. If you've got internet connection, you can see this, you can see the contracted copy of this peer-reviewed book. uh monograph and then comment on it and help me make it better and then when the whole thing gets bound printed shipped sent to amazon you can buy a hardcover of the book on amazon you can also buy a a a Kindle copy on Amazon but you can go and download a free PDF that's the final um sort of pressed version just like the the EPUB version of the book again from MIT Press.
So it's these two different steps. Right, the open the sort of the open review process and then the and then you know months and months later the open sort of the open access product, which is the book itself. And so I'm trying to do both of those things. I think I'd love to hear from from listeners. I've been sleuthing around and texting my you know my agent and my my editors at at both at the presses that I publish with in the past and ask, does anybody know of anyone who's done this before?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main goal of the podcast and who are the hosts?
0:05–4:21
2
How did Austin Choi‑Fitzpatrick develop the Massive Online Peer‑Review (MOPR) concept for *The Good Drone*?
4:21–7:34
3
What is PubPub and how does it enable an open, community‑driven review of a manuscript?
7:34–11:44
4
How did the traditional university‑press peer‑review process integrate with the open MOPR workflow?
11:44–15:08
5
What added value does the post‑review open‑access stage bring to authors and readers?
15:08–18:59
6
What are the incentives and challenges of publishing an academic monograph as open access?
18:59–21:53
7
How can scholars overcome jargon and pay‑wall barriers to reach a broader public?
21:53–26:28
8
What practical advice does Austin give to other authors who want to make their work more accessible and collaborative?
26:28–30:46
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
Robert A. Wilson, "Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Jonathan Quong, "Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)