Check out the "Collective action problem" described in this article. It describes why "Just publish on arXiV" isn't a practical solution. It doesn't lead to the problem being fixed, because of inertia against any individual breaking out of the system.

I've long wished that "journals" and academic societies would transition from a publishing model to a cultivation model. If everything is available on arXiv, that's great, but it also means the best of the best is mixed in with all the rest.

Journals (in the sense of whoever is on the editorial board) don't need to cease to exist; they just need to transition to "here's our list this month of what the best new articles are on X topic". The paper's already there on arXiv, you could already read it before. But having a group of editors that cultivate a list of good articles (as well as the peer review process that can, in an ideal world, serve to improve a paper) can serve to make sifting through arXiv less overwhelming, and draw attention to papers in particular subfields, subject matter, or whatever other criteria might be relevant.

In the publishing world, there is this thing called the slush pile: the collection of unsolicited submissions, essentially the only way a person without an agent can break into the field. And you can find quite a few editors' experiences with the slush pile in various blog posts or articles online. And the general reaction goes from naïve wonder at the idea of finding the diamond-in-the-rough to frustration with the quality of the submissions and a realization that the actual game is to figure out how to reject submissions with as little reading as possible (because they don't have the time to do any reading!). This is before LLMs came about, which have made the slush pile problem much worse because they don't improve the quality of the submissions but the increase the amount of reading that needs to be done to reject them.

Academia has the same fundamental problem. We don't actually have the time to read every possible paper someone has for us, because keeping up with literature takes time that we don't have. And while relying on the quality of the journal or conference as a metric for "is this paper worth reading?" has issues, to be honest, it is more effective than other proposed solutions. When I have done the literature searches that delved into the unknown, low-quality tiers of journals... no, those results were not worth the time I spent reading them.

I just checked in case it had changed, but Arxiv is nowhere near as free-for-all as you imply.

Any crank who learned to use LaTeX is not allowed to post articles willy-nilly. You need endorsements in the field.

There's also a middle ground, i.e., renowned publishers who aren't free but still publish everything as OA. One example is Dagstuhl Publishing for CS research papers.

Why isn't a citation just a citation. It's a pointer to a source, that's all. If it implies some standards have been applied or editorial or scientific review has been done, then that's going to have to be paid for by someone. TFA implies that doesn't happen: [and then] we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out. So a citation to an article in Nature isn't any better than one on arXiV.

Unfortunately I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. We should recognise that money is a necessary part of this process, else there is no gate to keep. But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed. Imagine if reviewing research papers was something you could get paid to do, the incentive then isnt to rubber stamp things, actually your rating as a reviewer would come down to quality of reviews

Exactly. The solution already exists. However another problem is that the arxiv is creeping towards the old model ...

>The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch.

This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia.

My Science PhD buddy looked at the journal title and the claim, then said: "Its true!"

I look at him with horror. Who cares about the journal, I want to know data and methodology.

I've basically never forgiven Academia since this. I see even Ivys put out bad research and journals will publish bad research (Replication crisis and the ivy fake psychology studies)

For outsiders, there is a prestige to being a PhD or working as a professor. Now that I'm mid career and lived through the previous events I mentioned + seeing who stuck with academia... These are your C grade performers. They didnt get hired by industry, so they stayed in school. They are so protective of their artificial rank because they cannot compete in Industry. Its like being the cool person on the tennis team. They are locally cool, but not globally cool.

> The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch

IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because we have plenty of research suggesting that higher-profile journals are in fact less trustworthy in many ways, or that there is no correlation at all between reputation and quality (see my other post here in this thread).

Yes, some trash journals publish all trash, but, beyond that, competent researchers scan the abstract, look at sample sizes and basic stats, and if those check out, you skip to the methods and look for red flags there. Also, most early publications will be on an arXiv-like place anyway so you can't look to reputation yet.

Likewise, serious analytic reviews like meta-analyses don't factor in e.g. impact factor or paper citations, since that would be nonsense. They focus on methodology and stats.

I really think we ought to shame academics that are filtering papers based on journal alone, it is almost always the wrong way to make a quick judgement.

> The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not considered a credible citation source since anyone can publish anything

I do some due diligence work from time to time. Uploading to arXiV is becoming a favorite tactic from companies trying to look impressive for investors. I’ve read a lot of “papers” submitted by startup founders that are obviously ChatGPT written slop uploaded to arXiV. They then go to investor and show their record of “published research”. Smart investors are catching on but there are a lot of investors who associate journals with quality and filtering and assume having a paper on there means something.

The filtering and curation problem is real. It seems like academic pettiness or laziness from the outside, until you see the volume of bad “papers” that everyone is trying to publish to chase the incentives.

Maybe studies could be dual published in open access publications and private.

Then you get the private branded badge social proof and access can continue.

Also, til anyone can publish to arxiv.org?

We have a gatekeeper already in the funding source - they do the work of vetting researchers prior to funding the work.

Piggy back this system so that the funding source publishes the papers itself, and researchers can only publish their papers that are directly funded.

This system requires the cooperation of an organization to build the publishing infrastructure, but this could be a lowest capable bidder, and less drag on the system overall.

Just putting it on arXiv does not automatically make it OA. It needs a permissive license.