Is it?
Looks more like academic bureaucracy to me
And herein lies a big problem with modern science, the two are conflated. Publishing by itself does little to advance science.
I feel there would be more science done if scientists discussed in an online forum than through papers
And then there's need for accessibility, for users with physical or mental handicaps, and for users with limited computing and bandwidth resources.
I haven't seen ieeexplore hosting datasets and yet we pay them to publish our stuff. Heck, most people don't even bother with publishing code or data, because there is very little or even negative incentive to do so.
The system is completely borked, because most people publish papers in order to advance their PhD studies, not their respective fields.
I strongly disagree. Publishing advances science the same way communication advances culture. Imagine Einstein didn't published any of his work. How many decades back in technology and quality of life we'd have been now?
It's like any evolutionary beneficial trait gets transferred to all population in one generation instead of many. It saves precious time.
Before electronic communications became popular, publications would publish "letters to the editor" which were kinda like an informal paper with a partial discussion or results (some publications still do that, btw).
My point here is that Publishing™ took place of simply publishing to share results with your colleagues and now the main objectives of Publishing™ is to dodge picky reviewers and to get your publishing score up to get more grants
Thank FSM for Arxiv and for researchers sending "drafts" or "unofficial" versions around
I also highly disagree that publishing does very little to advance science, it puts a relatively self-contained result into the record. Replacing publishing with forums would be the euivalent of replacing documentation with a chat.