The other way to mitigate this is to put your work on ArXiv before submitting it to conferences/journals, which is becoming more and more acceptable in at least some CS sub-fields.
Some have been posting their papers to pre-print servers and then skipping straight to commercialization attempts. This is especially concerning in the health and fitness world, where some supplement makers and fitness gurus are uploading documents to pre-print servers to give the illusion of being published authors. Casual observers may not be able to tell the difference between published, peer-reviewed papers and some random document uploaded that has a DOI on a pre-print server.
This doesn’t carry much weight in academia, but it can fool non-academic observers. I’m not sure if or how it will translate to CS papers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skipping peer review becomes more common as the pace of publishing increases.
This is probably a controversial opinion, but I think this makes sense anyway. Peer review & editing from journals made a lot more sense in the world where physically publishing, printing & distributing papers made out of atoms was expensive and difficult. And where retractions and corrections were near impossible, and where we didn't have systems for tracking reputation.
More and more I imagine research becoming like blogging - where "publication" happens by first putting your work online, and then getting feedback in the public domain. And "journals" are replaced by sites like HN or Mastodon which aggregate content and form focal points for a given community.
It won't be perfect, but neither is the current system. And speaking as a mostly independent researcher, the idea of signing over copyright of my work for the privilege of putting my work on their website is preposterous.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for the kind of corruption described here.
That honestly sounds like it either would be a step backwards, or it would end up re-inventing peer review. I think one of the basic functions of peer review is to provide a basic authoritative quality filter to help make the fire-hose manageable. As someone who lacks the infinite time needed to check everything myself, I find those kinds of filters valuable.
Peer review is good. Pre publication peer review is bad. Bring back the pre WW2 system. End the enormous waste of reviewer time and ludicrous delay. If it was good enough for Einstein it’s good enough. The only person deciding if it’s good enough to publish should be one editor.
IIRC, the current peer review system was created because academic specialization and the quantity of papers increased mid-century to a point where the pre-WWII system became unworkable. Specialization and volume have continued to increase, and it's hard to see how that makes the old system workable again.
We called it Assembl Chronos. It’s now available here at https://provenance.cerebrum.com. Please give it a try, I’d love to hear your thoughts :)
(More info: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/assembl-chronos-a-b...)