The end of the "peer review" is quite near :)

[Some] humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.
“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”

Oh my!  Finally people are figuring this out--that the peer-review system that we have in place is awfully antiquated!!!  Maybe Pandora did open up that box a second time to let hope out--no, not the music Pandora, but the mythological one :)

Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants. Open review more closely resembles Wikipedia behind the scenes, where anyone with an interest can post a comment. This open-door policy has made Wikipedia, on balance, a crucial reference resource.

Yes, indeed.  About time.
And, more ...

The most daunting obstacle to opening up the process is that peer-review publishing is the path to a job and tenure, and no would-be professor wants to be the academic canary in the coal mine.
... “There is an ethical imperative to share information,” said Mr. Cohen, who regularly posts his work online, where he said thousands read it. Engaging people in different disciplines and from outside academia has made his scholarship better, he said.
To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

When I interviewed for the position of Book Review Editor for Professional Geographer, I told them that one reason why the editorship would be truly exciting is this: this coming decade will be one of revolutions in the manner in which intellectual ideas are shared, and I wanted to be right in the middle of that action.

For whatever reason, I was not selected and was bummed out for a while.  But, that non-selection does not change in any way my conviction that changes are coming.  And, if faculty and higher education are any wise (editor: isn't that asking for too much?) then the changes will come from within.  Else ...