Yes.  It is the link between funding and publication records that matters here, not how useful journals are for doing research.<p>I was fortunate enough to work in an area of research for which the arXiv was originally established, and found that printed journals became increasingly irrelevant to me. Certainly, I would use them to find the dwindling number of papers not covered by the arXiv for reasons of age or subject matter, but for the day-to-day business of keeping up with the latest developments, the latency between submission to and publication in peer reviewed printed journals is far too great to be useful.<p>These preprints are not formally peer reviewed, but this mostly doesn't matter since they are always subject to an informal review by their readers -- if you are reasonably well-versed in a subject you can make up your own mind about whether or not a paper is any good, particularly after discussions with colleagues.