I will use myself as a case study. To a good approximation, all papers in my area appear on arxiv.org (specifically). Later, all of these same papers eventually appear in a journal. Therefore, in my area, paid journal branding is still very important to the community in establishing and maintaining reputation. I do not believe that the peer review service provided by journals is itself determinative. For example, there are rarely large differences between initial papers appearing on arxiv.org and final papers finally appearing in journals.

My decision on which journal to submit my papers, after they appear on arxiv.org, is decided not only on journal reputation but on whether or not page charges exist. Papers from my funded projects go to page-charging journals. I don’t care if these papers appear on paper — I care about the brand. Paying for the branding is built right into the grant: who would fund research that is not important enough to go to the top journals?

My unfunded projects, however, can only be submitted to journals without page charges. These journals likely exist either by external subsidies or access charges. Since the papers are all available for free on arxiv.org anyway, the journal access charges are not much of a gateway anymore. Universities still pay these access charges, though, to maintain the prestige of the university itself. Still, that seems to me a more tenuous reason that could change with time.

Were arxiv.org (for example) to become nearly as prestigious as major journals, the journal’s brand would bring little extra prestige for the buck, authors would get tenure without them, authors would not want to waste money on low-utility branding, authors would not bother submitting papers already on arxiv.org (for example) to paid journals, and the journals might close. Just now my research area is generally rich enough in government research monies, I believe, to fund the prestige cycle that props up most existing journal brands for at least the next few years.

Therefore, extrapolating, were government agencies such as the US National Science Foundation (for example) to mandate that no granted funds be allowed to cover page charges, I believe that most major journals in my area would eventually close. Science, however, in my opinion, would march forward relatively unfazed.

Databases, articles, journals, blogposts are all going to mesh together (and are already in many senses) and, from my world view, a journal article will be a report at a point in time summarizing a specific piece of work but providing access to an ongoing conversation with the community to allow the work to be extended, critiqued, re-analyzed, reworked and republished. The RSC is in the fortunate position of being a highly respected publisher, have been at the forefront of semantic markup technology and deliver multiple database projects. With the addition of ChemSpider they have inherited a structure database populated with experimental data, a network of 200 integrated data sources (and growing) and a curation and deposition platform to expand the connectivities with the community. One future for the scientific article for chemistry will certainly use this type of resource for connecting “articles” to live data and across the web. It’s coming..and fast.