I'm thinking that citations in papers can be actual links (akin to hyperlinks) to the location in the cited paper itself. This way it can be automatically verified that there are no citation loops, that citations reference current revisions, that the papers cited have not been retracted or otherwise discredited, and following citation trails becomes much easier. Would that help the citation-carcel issue, you think?

How can the review process be ported to that approach without losing the independence of the reviews? They are supposed to be anonymous and not affiliated with the authors in any way?

How important is anonymity in reviews? My thought process is going the opposite way: by linking reviews and comments on papers to the person/institution making it, it encourages them to be more responsible with their words and may indicate potential biases with regards to institution affiliations.

How can the amount of articles be reduced? Currently, you’re forced to publish as much as possible, published articles in “good” journals are your currency as a reseacher.

Here I'm also thinking the exact opposite: the issue isn't the numbers of papers, it's how the papers are organized that's the problem. We actually want MORE papers for the reasons hinted at here: important papers are going unpublished because they are (for lack of a better word) uninteresting. A null result is not an invalid result, and its important to get that data out there. By having journals gate-keep the data that gets released, we are doing the scientific community a disservice.

Of course, more papers increases the number of junk papers published, but that's where having the papers available openly and having citations linked electronically comes in. The data can be fed in to large data mining algorithms for meta analysis, indexing and searching, and categorization. Plus, if it later turns out that a paper is junk, any papers that cite it (and any papers that cite those, and so on) can all be flagged for review or just automatically retracted.

Thoughts?