What this network needs is a good 5¢ genealogy journal.

There's no good place to publish genealogy research online, it seems to me. Presentation of research includes giving reasoning and analysis of conflicting data, not just giving sources, so using a GEDCOM file is out. It would most likely be lost in cacophony of near-useless GEDCOMs anyway.

You can build a web page, but you have to find a suitable place to post it. That's not so easy, assuming one wants to have the information available over the long term. Do you want to be chained to paying a provider for whatever you consider the long term? What if you'd like your research to outlive your ability to pay, which can be limited by financial or functional ability, interest, or life itself? The many bad links we see testify to problems with this approach.

What free site could you put it on? Do you trust Ancestry.com (MyFamily.com) to keep your Rootsweb page accessible for years or decades? That doesn't seem wise given that it's a profit-seeking organization. With no formal structure to search for it, or to give an unchanging way to reference it (what with URLs clumsy and subject to becoming outdated), such sites don't seem nearly adequate. General free-page hosts like GeoCities seem like an even worse choice.

A relatively scholarly paper might find a good home in an academic research repository, where it would be safe for years and remain accessible. But try to find an appropriate repository. There are a few subject-specific ones, but pretty much only for scientific areas like physics and biology. The others are for members of an academic institution, e.g. for faculty of a university.

You might think that a genealogical society would have established an online journal for the good of genealogy generally. I can't find any such animal. Perhaps those societies are too bound up in bureaucracy or traditional approaches. Perhaps they depend on a paid, printed journal for financial support, and hesitate to provide a free online venue. Whatever the reasons, there seems to be no action from this sector.

With such poor options, I've been thinking of getting an online journal rolling myself. Looking into the mechanics, it seems viable, and at a quite low cost if volunteers run it instead of paid staff. Hosting is a small expense these days, and donations could easily handle it I'd think, at least unless data and traffic became huge. That seems unlikely to happen, because I don't think the hordes of name collectors that flock to Ancestry, Rootsweb, etc. would find much to attract them in a set of research papers.