[techphys_91]

I don't think this could work for a few reasons.

1. Blogs aren't peer reviewed. Anything that is going to be referenced later needs to be reviewed by other people.

2. It is easy to change the content of a blog after the initial publication. This causes issues for referencing, and removes the "story" of how things were developed which is very important. Hundreds of ideas might end up being wrong before the right idea is found. We shouldn't be able to "delete" the ideas which were wrong from history. This is a part of the reason that papers don't reference websites (with some exceptions e.g. links to software tools or result databases). This is even taught to first year undergrads who try to reference blogs in their lab reports.

3. The journal acts as an independent trusted third party, blogs wouldn't have this. How do I know whether I can trust a blog owner?

There are probably more reasons. All in all I'd like a more diverse group of distributors but I don't think self-publication could replace journals.

[BrandoElFollito]

Then how is the Apache web server peer reviewed? Or LaTeX? or some other open source software?

By means of people evaluating it (good, bad, knowledgeable or yahoo people), then you read their reports and you make up your mind.

When the subject is one I am an expert in, I will use it and tell everyone it is fine.

When the subject is not one I am an expert in, I will look at what others say and find out the ones who I can trust. This is how, say, Stack Overflow works. And it woks really fine.

The fact that the content is going to change is good. It means that there is a place where the knowledge is updated. Heck, it may become one day the ultimate reference. If it is handled properly it will have updates which keep track of the past.

I have a PhD in physics and had my fair share of publications in the medieval system of "peer reviewed, high impact journals". I am now in industry and I much more prefer to have multiple independent sources of truth and decide on my own. Not a single one is in a journal, all are in places which either state good stuff or are lost in a corner of Internet.

[MarkMMullin]

I think we have to start thinking about a way to make it work. There is pressure in some areas for papers backed by things like Jupyter notebooks, and machines make accessing the horde of information associated with a paper easier. We also need to disintermediate Elsevier and other bad actors, they're really causing a lot of trouble at this point. The problem IMO is that the internet is too much of a bazaar, and too little of a library. If there was a means to mark off the 'library' content of the internet such that if you asked for a resource at time t, you would get that resource at time t, many of these issues would go away. Sort of the wayback machine on steroids. Yes it would be hard, but not NP hard. This could also allow the use of blogs, in much the same way as private communications can be cited in papers. For example, "We elected not to run fluorine experiments due to advice from this source -- http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...

I know it isn't easy, but we really do need to embrace the internet with respect to scientific literature, not keep walling it off. Cornell's arxiv seems a good start.