Quality assessment and certification in open scholarly publishing and inspiration for MOOC credentialing

This chapter looks at the changing landscape of quality assessment and certification/credentialing in open knowledge systems by a comparative study between open publishing and open education. Despite the disruptive changes driven by open publishing in scholarly communication, it is challenging to develop widely accepted methods for quality assessment and certification. Similar challenges exist in open education platforms like the massive open online course (MOOC). This work reviews four types of innovations in open publishing in terms of quality control, namely “light touch” peer review, post-publication assessment, social peer review, and open peer review. Synthesising the principles and strategies of these innovations, it discusses how they might be inspiring for developing solutions and models for MOOC assessment and credentialing. This chapter concludes by suggesting future research directions. It argues that the open initiatives are co-evolving with the “traditional” systems and integrating with the established models.