I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system?
I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
Peer review is done for free by the community in any case, so this would not be a major problem. Most suggestions for a post-journal system I have seen so far are about setting up electronic journals with editorial boards that send out submissions for peer review as usual.
Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committees, existing journals have a lot of credibility, newly sprung up ones not so much.
We already have model for future journals: http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/
SIGMA is just an overlay over arXiv with added peer review. Also it has non-zero impact factor.
The value in this sort of compromise is that it's relatively painless to existing systems. You won't need to explain a whole new peer review system to a tenure committee, you won't need to radically restructure your grant spending, libraries pay more or less the same costs, and the journals get more or less the same revenue. The only difference is that now, your results are free for everyone to read (and not just in preprint form).
We'll have to wait and see whether this model turns out to be the first step in a gradual transition or a stopgap solution until a radically different approach to peer review becomes accepted. I for one am excited to find out.
We need journals because without them we'd have the Android App Store. I know that seems like a stretch but the challenge is that there are lots and lots of papers (publish-or-die is a mantra remember) and so quantity is assured, but quality is more nuanced. And more importantly quality of the work. So what a journal does is builds a reputation for filtering for only very high quality papers, and then other systems feed off that. So if you publish in Science that is cooler or more impressive than publishing in a journal which has no standards, or worse your own self published journal. The Android App store has a similar situation except it doesn't (yet) have a good quality filter, there is no third party that has risen to prominence as the place to go for authoritative reviews or opinions on the quality of a particular application.
I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?