Larry Wasserman's Rant on Refereeing comes hard on the heels of Karl Rohe's excellent Tale of Two Researchers in the latest Amstat News.
What's interesting to me is that the journals stopped being useful for keeping up-to-date on cutting edge research long ago; 15+ years ago, technical reports were readily available for download (in postscript format!) from departmental websites, and e-mail chains kept people within a field apprised of new work that was ready to be published. By the time an article was actually published in a journal, everyone who "mattered" had already read it and weighed in on it, even if they weren't referees. Things like arXiv are simply the natural evolution of this process.
So why hasn't the vestigial journal apparatus finally fallen away? Presumably because it takes more than a couple of decades to change something that has been around for a few hundred years. (duh) Again, I think even 15 years ago, your fellows should have already known whether you're doing good work, regardless of where you've published**. So is the real problem the administration, which only has where and how often you've published to go by when determining whether to give you tenure? Even then, things like CiteSeer make it easy to count citations, even for unpublished work.
So... it's the researchers themselves who will finally have to kill the journals by refusing to submit papers to anything but arXiv (or equivalent)?
** then again, I've been out of academia for 14 years, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this and the field of statistics hasn't progressed in that time
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