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Comment by bentoner | Hacker News Reader

All the things you mention are fine for dissemination but publishing in journals in not really about that any more; it's about certification.

Experts in your area---those who can actually understand your paper---mostly won't care whether your paper's been peer-reviewed or is just on the arxiv. You get it published mainly for folks who can't (or don't want to have to) understand it. You put up with all the crap this entails because the latter category usually includes people responsible for hiring you, promoting you or awarding you grants.

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I've just finished my PhD, so I'm an expert in a very small field.

Yes, it is true that I've read a good paper that I do not care whether it is peer-reviewed, on arxiv, or just on a homepage. As long as it is of good quality and there is a way to cite it, I'll probably cite it in one of my own articles.

However, and I'm not saying this out of defense for the current system, you must understand that the system is also in place to filter out some of the complete and total crap some people dare to call research. I've reviewed articles that made my toes curl, because of bad grammer, bad presentation, or just duplicating another article with 10% of the article changed.

Already at the moment there are so many journals and magazines that I have to keep track of that I simply don't have the time to search the web or dig up things on arxiv. I simply have to trust some system to filter out the good articles.

I think the journal system did an excellent job for its time. At some point, though, we will have to switch to a better reputation-assigning system.

This has the same failings as a system of information distribution where an aristocracy is given the authority to decide what is and is not important and correct. This introduces all sorts of random factors having nothing to do with any sort of objective measurement of the publication.

Those random factors don't even have to be nefarious; an expert in an area may not have sufficient sub-domain knowledge to fully understand the work of another author. The hope is that the publication is clear enough that they can, but every publication has to make a trade-off about how much knowledge they assume the reader has.

Each of these random factors chisel away at the intended meaning of the certification. If enough of these accrete, you end up with something that tells as much about a potential publication as a GPA does about a high school student. But then, people depend on things like that for hiring and promotions as well. It would be a damn shame if this is really sufficiently optimal that everyone stops working for better.

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