Medaille's suggestions are constructive: offering institutional experiments or reforms that might be improvements. Our current system is to screen out error and poor quality by peer review. But since journal editors and referees are not well-rewarded for doing a good job, the system often weeds out high quality and lets low quality pass through, and sometimes even takes high quality submissions and turns them into lower quality publications (after two years of revise-and-resubmit). And as others in this thread have pointed out, it often weeds out creativity, and novelty, in substance and method. At the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics a few weeks ago, one of the papers discussed the difficulty Gary Becker had in getting some of his innovative and controversial work published during the early stages of his career. And James Buchanan in his talk, mentioned how a paper of his on game theory was rejected by referees for lack of formal expression, even though the editor (Robert Mundell) later granted that the paper had made an important and sound point. In the discussion after Buchanan's talk, I suggested that another paradigm for publication would be to get a lot of stuff out there fast, and then correct the errors on the fly. Wikipedia might be one attempt at this. (Or Epinions, in the realm of product evaluations.) When Wikipedia first came out, many of us were highly sceptical of how reliable the information in it would be. But what has surprised me is how good the average entry is; and what is indisputable is how fast new entries are added; and how vast the coverage of topics. (Some of these issues are discussed in part of a neat book by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail.) Art Diamond