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A tragedy of the commons, then?

It follows from your comment that we should have anonymous authors in addition to anonymous reviewers. Can a researcher establish a provable track record of doing quality work while remaining anonymous?

only if they are independently wealthy

That would never happen, again because of incentives. Academics want to build their brand and publishing anonymously doesn't help with that.

Presently, for sure. I was wondering in the hypothetical, too, though. Authors really just need to provably show that they have a strong influence/presence on the publication graph or something. Although, reducing a researcher's entire value to a single scalar index is probably fraught. Also, egos would never go for completely anonymous authorship system, I think.

If you ever find yourself thinking like this, get the f out of science asap, you have no idea what you are doing.