Henry Farrell has been stirring up a discussion about peer review in the digital age (1, 2, 3, 4). Obviously, that the discussion is happening at all is because the Internet radically changes the possibility of access as well as the base cost of publishing. It is changing academic publishing across the board: already current experiments in open review are under way just today the local paper reported that the University of Iowa is now pursuing online publication of graduate theses. I sympathize with the graduate students’ objections, but it seems to me that at some point they, too, will need to change their idea of what constitutes their own intellectual property. The creative writing students in particular are clearly arguing that their ability to market their work depends upon the integrity of their completed manuscripts. But the university’s publication of their theses need not necessarily be perceived as a threat. First, it has the potential to secure more readers than they would otherwise have at this point in their careers; second, there is a potential to leverage the intellectual capital of the university even more than they already do. It appears, however, that Iowa’s graduate college—not the tightest of ships, by the way—needs to spell out and perhaps negotiate its publication policy more thoroughly.

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