Comment by Doches

I disagree -- an explosion of micro- and self-publishing would make it exponentially harder to stay abreast of new work. I can stay more-or-less up to speed on my field by attending two or three conferences and reading two journals (OK, so it's kind of a small field). If everyone who previously published in those four locations suddenly decided to self-publish I'd have to follow a couple hundred blogs/microjournals. Keeping up with all of those resources would be a non-trivial amount of work, not to mention the drastic drop in peer review quality that would likely result.