We already have that system, it's called the internet. Nothing stops you or I from putting our ideas online for all to read, comment on, update, etc.
The role of the publishers, flawed as it is, has little to do with the physical cost of producing or providing an article, and is filling (one can argue badly) a role in curation and archival that is clearly needed. Any proposal to change the system really has to address how those roles are met, hopefully cheaper than currently but definitely not more expensive because mostly people don't get paid (in $ or career or anything) now - or has to provide a funding source for it.
I don't really see how your outlined scenario addresses that, at least not in a way that's functionally different than today. Can you expand?
> We already have that system, it's called the internet. Nothing stops you or I from putting our ideas online for all to read, comment on, update, etc.
Are you asking how arxiv is different from blogspot?
You have the causality wrong. Prestige comes to journals by doing a good (or at least, better than peers) job of being a journal, which is providing a necessary function to the academic research process. If you want to improve on that system, you have to improve on those functions, or reduce the reliance on them by providing something better.
Put it another way, if you can design a system with a better ROC curve for classifying research, with a better TP rate for good papers, and have it cost less in real terms that current academic papers, then you are on to something. If all you've got is "papers should be free" or "it's too hard to access publishing from the outside" what you have are complaints, not solutions.
Like I said, it's not clear to me what exactly established journals have been doing "better" historically than a preprint server could. You say they are better at "being a journal" -- OK. They are established, well connected (to science communities, industry, journalism, funding agencies, etc.) and have been maintaining a reputation for a long time, usually much longer than preprint servers exist. That's basically prestige, which isn't nothing (I didn't claim prestige is nothing). However, this doesn't demonstrate journals do anything relevant to the advancement of science fundamentally better right now.
What I "have" is that
1. It's not obvious that a journal is fundamentally better at organizing unpaid voluntary reviewers compared to a preprint server.
2. Scientific publishing has insanely high profit margins. How come? My theory is that they are selling prestige first and foremost, i.e., a luxury good, (to scientists, universities and funding agencies simultaneously) and purchasing decisions there are made by people who are spending public money, not their own. Both of these points (luxury good, public spending) seem like strong contributors to high margins. The public is paying for the research and for access to articles, while journals nowadays on first glance seem to only provide a little bit of web hosting, a little bit of reviewer coordination and a little bit of manuscript editing.
3. It's not obvious that the submission and peer review systems we have now (in journals) is worth the time and effort. The role of peer review is misrepresented in journalism and the expectations are not met. If one could separate publication ("preprint") on one side, and, on the other side, review and "being featured by important outlets or institutions", authors could save a lot of time time (that could be used for more research). Others would have access to interesting results earlier and be able to build on top of them. Next, in a separate process some institution could select important works, scrutinize and review them, perhaps paying experts to do so, and perhaps replicate where appropriate.
The issue with this is that academics need the prestige provided by journals for career advancement, universities need the prestige to justify their spending to funding agencies and politicians, and funding agencies likewise need the prestige to justify their spending to politicians. The "replication crisis" and the like indicate that this prestige is overvalued. The hope is, economically speaking, that the market for "academic prestige" can either be disrupted, or the price the public has to pay can be lowered "through competition". It's interesting what that might look like. Preprint servers, open data and more direct science communication seem like steps in the right direction.
I'm clearly not articulating my point well. Obviously the idea is to "disrupt" the academic publication and review process, but this discussion seems to be focusing on the probably the easiest part - making and hosting the documents.
> Next, in a separate process some institution could select important works, scrutinize and review them
This is basically what happens now. Pre-prints are for things that aren't necessarily ready yet (hence the "pre") but cooked enough to review and discuss and build on. The formal publication process takes some percentage of them (depending on server, could be quite small) and works through a publication process.
Currently that is mostly done by for-profit journals organizing the work. If you want to propose.
So what you are suggesting is that we do away with that (fine!) and replace it with --- something handwavy (not fine). There has to be some real proposed mechanism of organizing the work that needs to be done that a) doesnt' waste even more time of the limited pool of people who can and will do a reasonable job of reviewing, even worse editing, does at least as good a job filtering out the large amount of noise to find signal, and is at least as robust against manipulation.
For what it's worth, many of your arguments about the lack of efficacy of the system or other flaws don't seem to me to capture how much worse it could be. Best not lose track of that in trying to make it better....
> So what you are suggesting is that we do away with that (fine!) and replace it with --- something handwavy (not fine).
I wasn't really trying to suggest any concrete system to replace the current one. Neither would I be able to do so nor would it really matter since such a system couldn't be implemented in a top-down fashion. I was pondering how things are and why, which is hard enough, as well as what trends I see positively (which are simultaneously actionable recommendations for both funding agencies and scientists).
> many of your arguments about the lack of efficacy of the system or other flaws don't seem to me to capture how much worse it could be
Sure, I think science as a whole has never been more productive. Many trends also look positive: besides what I named above, there is also increased industry collaboration for applied research, increased funding overall, etc. The main challenge will be the price of creating fraudulent submissions going down and hacking the system becoming more prevalent. I think the only way to address this is to significantly reduce the "perceived authority" of any work that comes from using a LaTeX template, as well as authority that comes with the label "peer reviewed".
> I think the only way to address this is to significantly reduce the "perceived authority" of any work that comes from using a LaTeX template, as well as authority that comes with the label "peer reviewed".
Opening up access unavoidably makes the signal to noise problem worse, not just for the reasons you note (fraud, exploits) but also average quality drops. Whatever changes are made, will need a more effective filter, not less effective.
Your concerns are valid, and I think that my proposal of paying reviewers and replicators addresses them all.
> It's not obvious that a journal is fundamentally better at organizing unpaid voluntary reviewers compared to a preprint server.
So, let's not rely on unpaid, voluntary labor. Pay them.
> they are selling prestige first and foremost,
Yes. So give them a better business model--if they can make money reviewing papers, they won't have to create artificial value by creating artificial scarcity.
> The role of peer review is misrepresented in journalism and the expectations are not met.
If you pay somebody, you can specify the expectations you think should be met. If they don't meet those expectations, they don't get paid.
> this prestige is overvalued.
The prestige is not overvalued--it is just too easily obtainable by fraud. Something has got to be done.
> Preprint servers, open data and more direct science communication seem like steps in the right direction.
They are vanity presses.
And they don't even do what you think they are doing. Today, the problem isn't too little information, it's too much misinformation. LLMs can chug out papers by the millions. Is a search engine going to help you cut through that and find what you are looking for? What if 2 million papers which match your search criteria? You gunna read through them all, trying to find the 5 papers which were actually written by a real scientist?
Are you even going to see them? Is the search engine going to do a better job than peer review of presenting you the papers you actually want to read?
> my proposal of paying reviewers and replicators addresses [all concerns]
Your other comment didn't say who might be paying reviewers. Journals clearly won't (why should they, they have grrat profits in the current system and will fight tooth and nail to delay any changes whatever). Universities and even funding agencies cannot (conflict of interest).
> Is the search engine going to do a better job than peer review of presenting you the papers you actually want to read?
> Your other comment didn't say who might be paying reviewers.
In the parent comment to this thread, I talk about this. My proposal is that when a researcher writes up the grant to get their research funded, they should estimate how much it would cost to pay reviewers and replicators, and include those figures in the cost.
If the researcher gets the grant approved, then the funding agency will put the money for peer review/replication into escrow. When the research is finished and the investigators have written up a paper to describe their methods and results, the money in escrow is disbursed to the reviewers and replicators.
If reviewers agree its good, and if it replicates, then the paper is published. If not, well we just dodged a bullet.
> I do actually expect to see that happen.
Are search engines getting better or worse for you? It was a lot easier getting the right paper from a search engine 10 years ago. Now, you just get half a page of irrelevant ads, and another half page of links boosted by payola.
Just imagine what it will be like when there are literally MILLIONS of bad papers for each good paper. Then Billions. There is no finite limit to the amount of bullshit that LLMs can--and therefore will--output.
No it's exactly true. You can write up anything you want and put it on a site. The post I was replying to was suggesting an open access system (both read and write) for exchanging ideas. This exists.
What it doesn't do is effectively replace the non-open system for access to academic journals. I have a lot of sympathy for open (read) access to research, particularly publicly funded. It just isn't sensible to wave a wand and say "all papers are free to read now" without some plan for the other parts of the system and the ecosystem (academic research) that relies on it.
I didn't say that. It needs something. Handwaving about an emergent community isn't useful - moving from todays system to something else needs something concrete.
We already have that system, it's called the internet. Nothing stops you or I from putting our ideas online for all to read, comment on, update, etc.
The role of the publishers, flawed as it is, has little to do with the physical cost of producing or providing an article, and is filling (one can argue badly) a role in curation and archival that is clearly needed. Any proposal to change the system really has to address how those roles are met, hopefully cheaper than currently but definitely not more expensive because mostly people don't get paid (in $ or career or anything) now - or has to provide a funding source for it.
I don't really see how your outlined scenario addresses that, at least not in a way that's functionally different than today. Can you expand?