It has become clear as print becomes pixels that every change produces confusion which produces exploitation.  One of the new sources of income for the opportunists has been scamming the WRITER rather than the reader.  There are so many people writing at such various levels, no longer monitored by the mechanism of "publishing," that anyone who promises an advantage to a writer will be rewarded.  The thing Western historians and writers know is that in a gold rush it is not the miners who profit in the end, but rather the purveyors of commodities from sex to booze to meat and hot water.   Most miners simply don't get rich, but the expectation is always there, even when the publishers demand that writers pay for their own illustrations, provide a plan for promotion, do their own indexing, etc.  -- all things once done by publishers.  Even peer review in narrow categories can be incestuous if not infested.

I think it is time to move from peer-review to peer-consortiums that curate the disintermediated functions of print production by whatever means.

Prairie Mary
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