Context (for those who might not be in academia): many academic publishing companies (like Elsevier) charge exorbitant prices for researchers to get their papers published as open access. Meanwhile, none of these researchers actually get anything in return for it (except for major street cred if their papers get highly cited)
I feel like in the age of the Internet people should just publish their own stuff. The problem then is being able to find it though. I think a site for only research papers where you can vote links to them up or down and submit peer reviews would be awesome. I'm looking in from the outside though so maybe that already exists?