I disagree -- an explosion of micro- and self-publishing would make it exponentially harder to stay abreast of new work. I can stay more-or-less up to speed on my field by attending two or three conferences and reading two journals (OK, so it's kind of a small field). If everyone who previously published in those four locations suddenly decided to self-publish I'd have to follow a couple hundred blogs/microjournals. Keeping up with all of those resources would be a non-trivial amount of work, not to mention the drastic drop in peer review quality that would likely result.

Step forward the new Publishers re-purposed as curated search engines.

There is a real possibility that all you would end up with is an on-line version of the current crop of dead-tree publishers. In addition to simply democratising publishing there needs to be some thought applied to the subject of the publisher as an institution. Learned societies and universities fit this approach so tools that made publishing easier for these group to manage would be a step forward. However any concentration of power or influence results in some of the current set of problems quickly resurfacing. Perhaps it is simply a facet of any enterprise where humans are involved and a revolution every so often is needed to shake things up a little.

But publication and aggregation no longer need to be performed together. That was a limitation of print publishing, since the cost of publication was high enough that you really needed to do your aggregation/filtering first.

Now the act of publishing is trivially cheap, so you can simply let everyone publish everything first, and apply aggregation and filtering second.

If you took all the attendees of those two conferences and gave them a collaborative website for rating and reviewing papers, you'd probably get something just as good as the old journals, and probably faster.

Then you could follow those blogs, pick out the best articles, and link to the good ones. You could even offer constructive critisism (i.e. "I'll link to you if you expand a bit on how you did step 3"). Kind of like a journal.

I could indeed. Only under the current system there's someone else, probably more qualified than me, already doing it for me. That's part of what's so great about peer review -- other people do it for you almost all of the time.

So, this other person ... what motivates them to do it? They don't get paid, and they don't really care about the journals (per say). Presumably, they do it for the good of their profession, or for fame, or because having a lot of influence in the field makes it easier for them to secure tenure / promotions / grant money.

We do it for the good of our profession. All I'm asserting is that the difference between the current system and a self-publishing free-for-all is that under the current system peer review for any single publication is performed by a small (3-5) number of people. I might review one or two publications per year (for no financial compensation, as you say) -- but in exchange for this effort I get to read dozens of papers which have been peer reviewed to a similar standard. In a free-for-all I'd have to put in the effort of peer reviewing every paper I read. That's a huge amount of work.

> In a free-for-all I'd have to put in the effort of peer reviewing every paper I read.

You seem to be criticizing a straw man. Nobody is suggesting that peer review should stop. We're suggesting that there's no longer any reason to link peer review with publication and access.

The real value is added by the reviewers and the authors, and they can keep on providing that value the same as always. It's the publisher who has become nearly superfluous, yet it's the publisher who charges boatloads of money for access.

I also disagree with a proliferation of micro self publishing without having an aggregation systems in place first. For the HN community it is obvious that the aggregation can be done post-publication and in theory there are many different ways to achieve this. However, it somehow never gets done. There is no Techmeme for science, no real effort to create filtering tools for the stream of scientific articles that are produced daily. Maybe it is a small market but there is a market. I would pay for a service that would give me a (useful) personalized stream of articles. Without the filtering/aggregation the idea of self publishing or the current trend for open access mega journals (PLoS ONE, Scientific Reports, etc) make content discovery a challenge.

I imagine that sites akin Hacker News would arise to help filter and curate each field. They could range from highly professional, well-financed operations to a prominent academic who catalogs interesting papers on her blog to a popularizer who focuses on exposing/explaining journal papers to a lay audience. Academic could use tools like Scholastica so self-publish in dozens of small sites free of charge - but they could also use Scholastica to replicate the 3-4 journals seen today. I don't think it's a given that a field will be harder to track - if anything, discovering great work would seem easier if more voices were able to play a role.

> I'd have to follow a couple hundred blogs/microjournals.

RSS?

I in no way disagree with this sentiment, and I am a very big fan of what Scholastica are doing, I had a really great chat to them a few weeks ago.

Scientific publishing seems from the outside to not really be making as much use of the web as a platform, as it should. Paywalls have a big part to play in that, as do contracts with non-disclosure clauses over how much libraries pay to publishers.

Open access and a move to article processing charges can go some way towards moving the needle on that.

One of the many other issues to content with (and there are many), is moving the behaviour of academics, who tend to be quite conservative. I'm hoping that with the backing of three of the biggest research funders in science I can get the attention of researchers who would not normally be early adopters of innovative approaches. I think once that shift starts to happen the door can be opened to a yet more radical re-thinking of the role of the journal.