  This article challenges the assumption that journals and peer review are
essential for developing,evaluating and disseminating scientific and other
academic knowledge. It suggests a more flexible ecosystem, and examines some of
the possibilities this might facilitate. The market for academic outputs should
be opened up by encouraging the separation of the dissemination service from
the evaluation service. Publishing research in subject-specific journals
encourages compartmentalising research into rigid categories. The dissemination
of knowledge would be better served by an open access, web-based repository
system encompassing all disciplines. There would then be a role for
organisations to assess the items in this repository to help users find
relevant, high-quality work. There could be a variety of such organisations
which could enable reviews from peers to be supplemented with evaluation by
non-peers from a variety of different perspectives: user reviews, statistical
reviews, reviews from the perspective of different disciplines, and so on. This
should reduce the inevitably conservative influence of relying on two or three
peers, and make the evaluation system more critical, multi-dimensional and
responsive to the requirements of different audience groups, changing
circumstances, and new ideas. Non-peer review might make it easier to challenge
dominant paradigms, and expanding the potential audience beyond a narrow group
of peers might encourage the criterion of simplicity to be taken more seriously
- which is essential if human knowledge is to continue to progress. Keywords:
Academic journals, Growth of knowledge, Non-peer review, Paradigm change, Peer
review,Scholarly communication, Science communication, Simplicity.
