Academia's emphasis on reputation isn't only problematic with respect to the adoption of open access. It also impedes the dissemination of important results that come out of less prestigious labs. I've often felt like science in particular would benefit from a sort of embargo period, during which time pseudonymous authorship would be obligatory, and after which researchers could collect their due credit. Too much focus is given to "rockstar" PIs and their labs rather than the substance of their findings.

An interesting historical example of this was an early breakthrough in interpreting genetic code by Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei [1], both of whom were considered unremarkable and largely ignored by more established geneticists at the time of their discovery, who were fixated on finding a hypothetical "delimiter" between genetic instructions coded in DNA.

This, however, is a digression for another day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirenberg_and_Matthaei_experim...