Why Journals?

"Why Journals?" is an interesting blog post from folks at RePEc ("a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components") - considering a scholarly publishing world without journals. Thought this brief excerpt regarding libraries was also interesting:

Libraries

It is sometimes said that journals permit journal rankings, and this is a help for librarians for deciding which journal to subscribe to. This is, of course, not an argument for supporting journals. Without journals, there would be no problem of selecting journals, and the librarians could concentrate on selecting books.

So I conclude that libraries would perform better if we had no journals.

The full post is here: http://blog.repec.org/2009/12/16/why-journals