[jayajay]

Lately I have been questioning whether or not we need large-scale peer-reviewed journals anymore.

For example, if I knew that Leonard Susskind read a paper and cited, shared, liked, or bookmarked it, then that could easily replace my fundamental need of having the paper stamped by a trusted authority. If scientists could share, cite, and discuss papers on an open source platform (like Facebook, but for Academia), I believe that we wouldn't need these gatekeepers anymore, and they would become obsolete. The real authority has always been the scientists who are doing good, promising research, not some contrived group of scientists who are solely reviewing papers for the sake of assessing their quality.

An (possibly flawed) analogy: do need CNN/ABC/FOX when we have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to propagate news?