> The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? I

> The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? It's happening slowly in some fields. Well, not quite independently, but in loose professional associations. It requires pretty coordinated action and still has a chance of failing though. One early successful case is that almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned in 2001, and threw their weight behind a community-run, non-profit, open-access alternative, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), which is now considered by most people to be at least as prestigious as the Springer journal. Open letter with their rationale from the time: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html