That's my general sense of how things should be, although increasingly I see issues with that in terms of basic "visibility" dynamics in terms of the search engine problem and so forth.
For example, Google seems to be downweighting search results older than a certain amount, and I've noticed that if you go that route, it can be difficult to find certain unpublished/preprint-type papers of a certain age unless they appear in press. I think this might lead to an exacerbation of fad dynamics, because then papers that people know and remember are those that get a lot of buzz -- this happens now of course too, but I think it could be magnified in a different system.
You could introduce new search engines and so forth, but that adds a layer of complexity to it, and I think journals always have a way of drawing attention to certain new papers and maintaining their real-world availability.
I'm not sure I have a solution to this, but I've sort of become convinced that the approach you're describing, even though it's something I'm sympathetic to, has its own sets of problems that aren't necessarily better. I also wonder if journals will just end up being reinvented because there seems to be a logical train of thought that goes "well pay attention to those you trust to find papers" -> article curators -> fickleness about what's curated -> curation by committee/group -> reinvention of journals.
Things are completely broken imho (in academics in general, not just journals) but I'm not sure what to do about a lot of it. Maybe the problems in academics have always been social weaknesses that get brushed under the rug, but now with so many people involved there's too much to brush.
For example, Google seems to be downweighting search results older than a certain amount, and I've noticed that if you go that route, it can be difficult to find certain unpublished/preprint-type papers of a certain age unless they appear in press. I think this might lead to an exacerbation of fad dynamics, because then papers that people know and remember are those that get a lot of buzz -- this happens now of course too, but I think it could be magnified in a different system.
You could introduce new search engines and so forth, but that adds a layer of complexity to it, and I think journals always have a way of drawing attention to certain new papers and maintaining their real-world availability.
I'm not sure I have a solution to this, but I've sort of become convinced that the approach you're describing, even though it's something I'm sympathetic to, has its own sets of problems that aren't necessarily better. I also wonder if journals will just end up being reinvented because there seems to be a logical train of thought that goes "well pay attention to those you trust to find papers" -> article curators -> fickleness about what's curated -> curation by committee/group -> reinvention of journals.
Things are completely broken imho (in academics in general, not just journals) but I'm not sure what to do about a lot of it. Maybe the problems in academics have always been social weaknesses that get brushed under the rug, but now with so many people involved there's too much to brush.