One thing I see a lot of, given the kind of community we are and so the kinds of people I read to see what's happening in the rest of the world, is how things have to change.  I wrote a piece earlier on Open science and the march of history where I discuss the efforts of companies like Mendeley to shift the thinking of researchers toward open access and open science.

But do they really have to change?   If an overwhelming majority of researchers like the system as it exists why would a small group insist on change?   As I have said too many times to count, the reason I never did a collaboration tool for Science 2.0 is because I couldn't figure out a way to not lose a lot of money.  I wouldn't need to make a lot, just not lose a lot, and I didn't believe the bulk of researchers want to collaborate, given the competitive nature of grant funding.   Tackling just the communication aspect of Science 2.0 has meant I can't lose money.  The costs are not huge, servers and programming, and the contributors are paid but we don't buy content so the fixed costs are not onerous and our serious science content has meant an audience of a million people a month, so we do well.  But a collaboration tool is a lot more effort. Read: money.

However, the physics world has done well by using a preprint service called arXiv, which is basically a way to get the word out about research before it gets bogged down in the chain of peer-reviewed journal cycles, where many apply to their first choice and, if rejected, move on down the chain.   A well-done preprint actually accelerates publishing in journals.

Lindsey Tuominen, doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia, had another take, writing on our Science 2.0 Facebook page:

 the "life sciences community" is considerably larger than the physics community, and the average authorship list is smaller as I understand, so getting everyone to agree upon a single archive could be a big challenge, and the amount of e-space necessary to hold the amount of publications would be much greater. Basically, the community insofar as it exists is a lot more heterogeneous and the connections between subdisciplines are simultaneously more tenuous (e.g. cancer biology vs. photosynthetic biology) and more necessary (e.g., for genomicists it helps to know something about protein function and bioinformatics).

So they rely on each other but they are too diverse and 'getting everyone to agree upon a single archive could be a big challenge' sounds like 'too competitive' - I doubt everyone uses arXiv, it simply caught on because a group of people created it and it meant well.  Heck, some people feel like any standard at all in physics is too much so viXra was created to be the wild frontier of physics and math, even of kookiness that is too out there for arXiv.

Life sciences people are a lot more sensitive than physical sciences but no one is trying to get some craziness about violating the second law of thermodynamics taught in schools as equivalent to Newton so biologists have a right to be concerned about legitimizing work that hasn't appeared in high-priced journals.   

But if, as claimed, the bulk of good research is unfairly penalized by not appearing in top journals, good research might have a better chance of rising to the top if it is preprinted and discussed prior to getting seen by editors at journals.