Transforming the mechanisms and the purposes of peer review

The system of peer review as currently practiced is premised on a publishing economy of scarcity - only a certain number of books and journals can be economically sustained, and peer review is therefore necessary as one mechanism to ensure that only the best work is published. With the advent of electronic publishing, says Kathleen Fitzpatrick, there is "a vast transformation in both the mechanisms and the purposes of peer-review" -

"What if peer-review took place not prior to publication but on texts that have already been made public? What if that peer-review happened not anonymously, in back-channel communications with individuals other than a text’s author, but in the open, in direct communication between reader and author? Technologies ranging from commenting to, as John Holbo suggested in a recent post on The Valve, a more elaborated P2P system, could be made to serve many of the purposes that current peer-review systems serve (most importantly for institutional purposes, the separating of wheat and chaff), but would shift the process of peer-review from one that determines whether a manuscript should be published to one that determines how it should be received."

Katleen makes several other interesting points in her post. Also have a look at the comments.