Self-Archiving and Peer Review
Sometimes people get the idea that self-archiving means abandoning publishers altogether; they mix up publishing and archiving, as well as of preprints and postprints. In fact, authors self-archive both pre-refereeing preprints and refereed postprints, and each is clearly labelled in the eprints archive as such. The peer review continues to be performed by the referees, as it always was. Peer-review is medium-independent, and self-archiving in no way alters the peer review system.
There are academics who champion alternative methods of academic quality control. Those who wish to reform or replace peer review would first need to go out and test their alternatives, to demosntrate whether or not they will generate a literature of a quality, reliability, and useability at least equal to the one we have now. But meanwhile, self-archiving is about providing open access to the peer-reviewed literature we have now, such as it is, to free it from access-tolls, not from peer-review.