There are too many journals, so that important information is spread too thin, and the journals cost too much. Anyone not a member of a cartel (aka major research establishment) cannot afford them. Researchers submit more and more papers and grant proposals, but are less and less willing to review others' submissions. On the other hand, ever better quality information is available, for free, on the web. Even the concept that information consumers would, at least, pay for editors and reviewers to direct them to the worthwhile stuff has not panned out. This can lead to societies who should be concerned with information propagation, ironically being so worried about financial survival that they restrict members' papers' information flow. As members correctly sense the societies' decreasing utility, the societies' membership falls.

What, if anything, should we do about this? Will we all get our information from researchers' own web sites, which we locate with google? How will we then judge their correctness? What happens if spam web pages should arise, in so much greater number than the useful sites, that filtering out the useful sites becomes hard?

The challenge is to devise a new model for the production, vetting, and distribution, of scientific information, and of selecting whom to fund.