One cannot disagree with most of what Fytton Rowland wrote in his Ariadne article: The four chief functions of the scholarly literature are indeed the ones he listed: quality control, information dissemination, archiving and academic credit. He is quite right about the indispensability of peer review (Harnad 1982, 1986, 1995b), and about how the safety of our bridges and of our very bodies depends on it. Nor can one take issue with his distinction between fact and opinion (in principle, though their disentanglement in practise is not always that straightforward Harnad 1984, 1985). Both prepublication peer review and continuing postpublication peer scrutiny in the form of critical commentary and attempts to replicate and build on published work are vital to the self-corrective enterprise of scientific inquiry, and perhaps to all of learned inquiry (Harnad 1992).
Incontestable also is the existence and the utility of a hierarchy of learned journals, from the most rigorous and prestigious ones at the top all the way down to a vanity press at the bottom. If the distinctions that these journals mark were levelled, scholars and scientists could not calibrate their reading and research universities could not calibrate their hiring and promotion practices. Rowland correctly recognises that both peer review and the prestige hierarchy are medium-independent, but that the inertial mass is currently tilted toward the old medium, and that many aspects of the status quo conspire to keep it there for as long as possible.
The disagreement begins when we get down to specifics:
The reason that publishers cannot make an instant transition is not that the learned community is unready for the change. The change has already happened in physics and in some respects happened so rapidly and so globally that it has hardly been noticed. But there is a safety net under xxx, and it is held in place by the "Invisible Hand" of peer review, which is still being financed by the publishers whose paper journals are still the final resting place for virtually every eprint in xxx.
No one can imagine what would become of the physics literature if all means of support for publication quality control in physics were withdrawn. Possibly universities might pick up the tab in some cases, but it's hard to see how the load would be distributed: with the worldwide physics community the beneficiary, who's to be the benefactor? One hears learned societies, university consortia (funded by savings from library serial cancelations) and governments mentioned in this context, but no one has written a credible transition scenario. I don't claim to know the right one either, but I can recognise the wrong one when I see it:
The remaining cost of serial publication, once expenses are scaled down to the electronic-only level, is low enough to render the interests of everyone -- the author, the reader, the funder of the author's research, the university supporting the author, and, yes, the electronic learned serial publishers -- better served by recovering those costs and a fair profit at the author's end, in the form of page charges (paid for by the funders of the author's research and/or the university employing him to do the research, both co-beneficiaries, with the author, of the widest possible unimpeded distribution of the research reported), rather than by any version of reader-end payment, the latter depending as it does, on restricting access to what the author and his supporters would all prefer to see as free for all.
Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research Communication. Computers in Physics. (August, American Institute of Physics). 8(4): 390-396. http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/
Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement. The Sciences 19: 18 - 20.
Harnad, S. (ed.) (1982) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harnad, S. (1984) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific knowledge. American Psychologist 39: 1497 - 1498.
Harnad, S. (1985) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science, Technology and Human Values 10: 55 - 62.
Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase. (Review of S. Lock, A difficult balance: Peer review in biomedical publication.) Nature 322: 24 - 5.
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Harnad/HTML/harnad90.skywriting.html
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2 1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach Holme Publishers, 1992; and in: M. Strangelove & D. Kovacs: Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists (A. Okerson, ed), 2nd edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992); and in Hungarian translation in REPLIKA 1994; and in Japanese in "Research and Development of Scholarly Information Dissemination Systems 1994-1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html
Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub.html
Harnad, S. (1995a) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis? Serials Review 21(1) 78-80 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 31-33 1995) http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis.html
Harnad, S. (1995b) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Electronic Publishing Confronts Academia: The Agenda for the Year 2000. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Pp. 103-118. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.peer.review.html
Harnad, S. (1995c) The PostGutenberg Galaxy: How To Get There From Here. Information Society 11(4) 285-292. Also appeared in: Times Higher Education Supplement. Multimedia. P. vi. May 12 1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html
Harnad, S. (1995d) There's Plenty of Room in Cyberspace: Response to Fuller. Information Society 11(4) 305-324. Also appeared in: Times Higher Education Supplement. Multimedia. P. vi. June 9 1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/harful1.html
Harnad, S. (1995e) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/subvert.html
Harnad, S. (1995f)
Interactive Cognition: Exploring the Potential of Electronic Quote/Commenting.
In: B. Gorayska & J.L. Mey (Eds.) Cognitive Technology: In Search of
a Humane Interface. Elsevier. Pp. 397-414. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.interactive.cognition.html
Harnad, S. (1997) How to Fast-Forward
Serials to the Inevitable and
the Optimal for Scholars and Scientists. Serials Librarian 30: 73-81.
(Reprinted in C. Christiansen & C. Leatham, Eds. Pioneering
New Serials
Frontiers: From Petroglyphs to CyberSerials. NY: Haworth Press.)
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.learned.serials
Harnad, S. & Hey, J. (1995) Esoteric Knowledge: The Scholar and Scholarly Publishing on the Net. In: Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law & Ian Mowat (Eds.) Networking and the Future of Libraries. London: Library Association Publishing. Pp. 110-118.
Hayes, P., Harnad, S., Perlis, D. & Block, N. (1992) Virtual Symposium on Virtual Mind. Minds and Machines 2: 217-238. http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.virtualmind.html
Odlyzko, A.M. (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (formerly International Journal of Man-Machine Studies), 42 (1995), 71-122. Condensed version in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 42 (Jan. 1995), 49-53. http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/complete.html