Tim Gowers wrote an interesting post where he proposed in surprising many details an Internet mechanism (mixing ingredients from the arXive, blogs, MathOverflow and polymath projects) to replace Journals. Noam Nisan (who advocated similar changes over the years) wrote an interesting related post entitled the problems with Journals.
A subsequent post by Gowers proposed a much less radical proposal. And Noam also wrote an interesting subsequent post entitled the good things about Journal.
My favorite post on this issue from Izabella Laba’s blog The accidental mathematician is entitled Random thoughts on publishing and the internet .
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Excellent post, yes, needs time to digest, but surely times are changing. The idea of an importantly upgraded arXiv with a moderated layer seems like genius. Still, I might expect publishers to send killer teams to Tim’s home since a change like this would certainly send a lot of companies out of business.
Also, I am guessing that most of us are daily assaulted by spam email coming from the most obscure “open access” journals from the most far off places — many of them apparently scams are reported in a recent article in Science (sorry, failed to find the link). Surely there must be a way out of this.
Dear Vania, thanks for your comment. As you can see in the discussion on Gowers’s blog and Nisan’s, My own view is rather negative towards the new ideas.
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Another related proposal posted on Mathoverflow some time ago: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/63851/ideas-to-face-the-current-publishing-issues-closed