One thing I hope to think a lot about in graduate school (assuming I will still have time for personal thinking) is how academic work is published/distributed. As most of my friends know, I’m very interested in and active in the “open” source/access/content movement but I’m far from having sorted out all my thoughts on this when it comes to history and the academic world. The key word, and most troublesome issue is “peer review” or more broadly the academic world as meritocracy. There are lots of blogs talking about this already but the postings are all over the place. One particularly high concentration of stuff is being written on the Open Access News blog. For example see this entry on how the scientific journal Nature is thinking about open access publishing.