Joseph K. Pickrell has a provocative post over at Genomes Unzipped, Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?:

The recent announcement of a new journal sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust generated a bit of discussion about the issues in the scientific publishing process it is designed to address—arbitrary editorial decisions, slow and unhelpful peer review, and so on. Left unanswered, however, is a more fundamental question: why do we publish scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals to begin with? What value does the existence of these journals add? In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a “killer app”.

[emphasis in the original]

This reminds of the discussion between Melody Dye and Jason Goldman on bloggingheads.tv. After reading Mr. Pickrell’s case, and generally slouching toward a more “open science” stance overall since that diavlog, I think I am now moving toward Melody’s position of “end it,” rather than Jason’s position of “mend it.”

The action in the Genomes Unzipped post is ...