The answer to this question is “yes” according to biophysicist Cameron Neylon, the author of the blog Science in the Open.
He said the current system of communicating the results of scientific research via journal articles is a 17th-century solution to a 17th-century problem. “Printing was adopted because researchers got tired of sending letters to each other… Publishing was essentially letter aggregation. When there became too many letters, peer review was introduced. You can argue that the biggest innovation since then has been the removal of ‘Dear Sir’ from the beginning of articles.”
Dr Neylon believes that if scholarly communication were redesigned from scratch for the digital age, it would look radically different. Most significantly, the monopoly of the journal article would be smashed….
Read more here. This article is focused on the sciences, but since social scientists and humanities scholars have adopted the scientists’ system of peer-reviewed journal articles, Neylon’s arguments certainly have relevance for us historians.
The Past Speaks 