Publishing Without Journals: An Open, Forkable Archive with Attributed Review
The journal is a seventeenth-century technology asked to do four modern jobs at once: disseminate results, certify their quality, allocate scholarly attention, and confer career credit. It does none of them well. Pre-publication peer review is slow, only weakly reliable, demonstrably biased toward established authors and institutions, and expensive, while the reviewing effort it consumes is spent largely on work that will never matter. We argue that these are not defects to be patched but consequences of bundling dissemination and certification into a single gated act, and we propose unbundling them. Under the proposal, authors deposit papers in an open archive; certification happens \emph{after} deposit, continuously, through attributed and up- or down-voted public commentary to which authors may reply; and papers are version-controlled objects that any qualified reader may \emph{fork}, so that the lineage of an idea -- and hence the credit for it -- is recorded automatically. None of the individual components is speculative: each already exists somewhere in the scholarly ecosystem. The contribution here is to argue that assembling them into a single venue that \emph{replaces} rather than supplements the journal is both feasible and preferable, and to confront the objections -- sparse participation, the chilling effect of real names, the loss of the certification signal, and the non-meritocratic distribution of attention -- that any honest version of the argument must answer.