Peer review is a core building block of formal science publishing. In reality, anonymous review is not effective in fulfilling the intended purpose of assuring accuracy and credibility; its nature promotes fraud and is an excuse for delay. Authors must know who is evaluating their work and what they have said. Peer reviewers must be forced to stand up before the community with the same bravery as the author. Peer review makes science better with openness and by promoting dialog. Being reviewed in the open, subjected to a public critique is hard. Reviewing someone when you know THEY know who you are is also difficult, but it is the only way that there can be a true dialog in science.

Scientific journals keep alive a culture of unnecessary adjudication, delay, corruption-rich anonymous peer review, and conclusions without the underlying data sets. Enough! What the world needs are publishing platforms, not journals. Here is what a publishing platform does:

1. A “hygiene” check to ensure that what is proposed to be published is science (uses scientific method, interrogates data properly) but makes NO attempt to determine interest, impact or ultimate correctness.
2. Provide a platform to publish the findings in a readable and accessible format, without any delay.
3. Provide the machinery of open and transparent peer review so that conclusions of the paper can be vetted formally by the scientific community, not by an editor.
4. Provide the functionality to host and
5. support scientific dialogue about the paper, both commentary and rebuttal fully in the open on the Web.
6. Ensure that ALL data associated with the paper are published and accessible. If you aren’t willing to publish your data nobody should be willing to publish your paper.
7. Publish everything and make publishing quick and easy. A publishing platform does not discriminate between a deep research paper and a small observational note, or indeed, an editorial piece. All articles of all types can advance science and benefit society.

It is time for publishing -- the sole window through which science is made visible to the world -- to embrace the open culture of the Internet. In an age of serious global challenges, science will continue to be the source for answers. Those answers must be delivered with speed, fairness, transparency, and freedom from bias. The scientific journal is a relic of another age.