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Peer review goes back to at least 1665 with the founding of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. However peer review did not become well established until the middle of the last century. For example, Einstein's 1905 papers in Annalen der Physik were not subjected to a peer review process. The purpose for which peer review was established is not clear. The probable motives include a combination of rationing of (then) very expensive journal pages, catching obvious errors, and at least some degree of quality control on what is published. The question now is "Do past models make sense in the world of the Internet?", as today, on-line published pages are essentially free and continuous on-line review and rebuttal is practical.

Over the last 15 years, the Internet has enabled new modes of authorship, new forms of open licensing and distribution, and new forms of collaboration and peer production to flourish. But in turn, new anxieties have arisen, especially concerning quality assurance, peer review, reuse, and modification. New innovations are appearing in peer review, endorsement, the measurement of trust, and the understanding of reputation, but without any systematic analysis of the general principles of quality assurance and peer review in this new era. In this paper, we propose a general set of principles for understanding what peer review was in the past and how it should be applied today to different kinds of content and in new platforms for managing quality. The principles stress an analysis not only on the content in materials but also on their context of use. Our focus is on open educational resources, and we present a case study of the open education project Connexions' lens system for quality assurance and review. However, the principles can be applied across multiple levels of knowledge production, including scholarship in engineering and science and reference materials in addition to educational publishing.