Personally, what really gets me with the current publishing regime is how fashion-driven it is (at least in many parts of CS). Oftentimes, it feels like the mos

Personally, what really gets me with the current publishing regime is how fashion-driven it is (at least in many parts of CS). Oftentimes, it feels like the most challenging aspect of producing publishable research at first is not rigor or novelty or writing a sufficiently readable complete paper but hitting something sufficiently "interesting"—largely a function of what happens to be popular at the moment. Publishing has other issues, but they can be mitigated by releasing results in forms besides simple papers. (Again, I'm mostly talking about CS.) A lot of successful projects end up releasing blog posts, enhanced online resources, libraries or complete, living open source projects. At least in CS, this is happening enough to be useful even if it is by no means universal. This even comes up in more theoretical fields—somebody recently pointed me to a website[1] on tree edit distance, which is a great example. (I really wish it had existed a few years ago when I needed the algorithm originally!) [1]: http://www.inf.unibz.it/dis/projects/tree-edit-distance/ http://www.inf.unibz.it/dis/projects/tree-edit-distance/