I fully think open peer review in various forms, is awesome and should be pursued, but the arxiv serves a more fundamental need as well: To simply make the papers available. Within the fields where arxiv is established this is not an issue, but we need to get adjacent fields, and really everyone to agree to a publicly available database of research first. There is still considerable reluctance in some quarters to upload to the arxiv as I found out after changing fields.
The arxiv should be a pure database, then we can think about various ways to build on top. That could be arxiv overlay journals or journals that try out more fancy, new peer reviewing systems that might include curated comments [0].
As long as there is considerable disagreement over what the right format for serious commenting on papers is, arxiv should not be taking sides.
I fully think open peer review in various forms, is awesome and should be pursued, but the arxiv serves a more fundamental need as well: To simply make the papers available. Within the fields where arxiv is established this is not an issue, but we need to get adjacent fields, and really everyone to agree to a publicly available database of research first. There is still considerable reluctance in some quarters to upload to the arxiv as I found out after changing fields.
The arxiv should be a pure database, then we can think about various ways to build on top. That could be arxiv overlay journals or journals that try out more fancy, new peer reviewing systems that might include curated comments [0].
As long as there is considerable disagreement over what the right format for serious commenting on papers is, arxiv should not be taking sides.
[0] http://www.earth-system-dynamics.net/peer_review/interactive...