The featured article demonstrates that good review may not be a function of the number of reviewers available. I personally think that with a glut of reviewers, there's a higher chance an editor will assign a referee who doesn't have the capability (or time!) to perform an adequate review and manuscripts will be rejected for poor reasoning.
I think the problem with a “publish first” paradigm is that it creates an enormous amount to sift through that is of unverified quality. We’re already publishing ever increasing amounts even with journal gatekeepers.
Replicating research is already difficult. Finding quality research under the publish first approach will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack and I fear considerable research will be wasted on dead ends.
> Replicating research is already difficult. Finding quality research under the publish first approach will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack and I fear considerable research will be wasted on dead ends.
I don't think I ever heard anyone complain that eg Arxiv makes replicating research harder?
Well I guess I'm one, if you expand the consideration between a single arbitrary paper. The operative word in my previous comment is “quality”. Since we operate in the real world with constraints on resources like time and labor, making the haystack needlessly big can become a problem with replication. I want to focus my time on the highest quality papers because they are the most likely to be replicated in a useful manner. There is no sorting mechanism in open publishing so I may waste unseemly amounts of time trying to read and replicate crap. Publishing is far from perfect, but it does help separate the wheat from the chaff. (This point has already been discussed in this thread so I won't belabor the conversation further).
