Joe, 

Well, yes, dysfunctionalities is a clunker of a word; it's far too sesquipedalian.

And I entirely agree that scholarly publishing is an insular world and in the big scheme of things, such as the ultimate fate of the universe or much earlier on, the potential engulfment of the earth by the sun turning into a red giant, scholarly publishing is a pretty paltry thing indeed. 

But we have to live in the here and now. And from where I sit, researchers are now engulfed by too much to read, scientific results are going to be rediscovered and rediscovered, and the t and p process feeds this growing heap, creates hyper-specialists, and potentially wrecks creativity. 

More close to home, people like me become cantankerous and dyspeptic about this whole system, requiring as it does the annual caffeine-fueled ritual of wading through acres of CPU and other metrics in spreadsheets, making one's eyesight feeble. The endless epic rounds of negotiations year over year to juggle and re-juggle the stock of subscribed journals and avoid Trojan traps. And think too of all those poor peer reviewers and how much they are expected to wade through. Someone has to do peer review, but there's too much of it. I suppose however some of them actually doing so much superfluous work, but these are the ones we worry about.

I suspect your instincts are pretty Burkean. Mine are too. The system doesn't need overthrow, as some of our friends seem to think.  It just needs tweaking to bring out the best of what has worked since the 17th century, so it can shine.

In the meantime, I actually watch all this unfold with mild amusement. Not to worry, the world is not coming to an end. Let that happen billions of years from now.

Brian Simboli