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leoctoday at 3:23 PM1 replyview on HN

Right, it seems that many of the weaknesses in the system exist because they serve the interests of journal publishers or of normal, legitimate-ish researchers, but in the process open the door to full-time system-hackers and pure fraudsters.


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bonoboTPtoday at 10:18 PM

Any system that grows too fast has these kinds of problems. When it's a small intimate circle where everyone knows everyone, reputation alone can keep people in check. Once it's larger you need to invent rules and bureaucracies and structures and you will have loopholes that bad actors can more easily exploit, hiding in the crowd, than in the small version. It's the same with the Internet or computing. Security was much less of a topic when it was mostly honest academic nerds using the Internet, and the protocol designs often didn't even assume adversarial participants. Science also still runs on this assumed honesty system that worked well when it was small.