thejoneser

My impression (partly from reading Zephyr Teachout's excellent book Break Em Up) is that a farmer cooperative would not find the big grocery stores willing to carry their products. Those stores are intimidated by whichever of the big-3 processors is active in their region. Selling at a farmers market or mom & pop store may be totally feasible, but the grower had better be sure that was a long-term solution, because the big processor will blackball them for trying.

Yes, that's got to be part of the explanation. What's not clear to me is why anyone gets professional credit (e.g., tenure) for publishing in a journal that is obviously bad.

What is the alternative? Channeling Chuchill, peer review is the worst form of journal review except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

As an associate editor and frequent reviewer, I can say with confidence that peer review filters out at least 90% of the garbage that journals receive as submissions. It also provides useful feedback to researchers who cannot otherwise get it. People submit papers knowing they will get rejected because they want to read the referee reports.

In my field, academics simply do not trust a result until it has been replicated and scrutinized by other researchers. If that doesn't happen, it's usually because the result was not interesting enough for anyone to care. If the scrutiny reveals problems, that undermines the credibility of the authors, which is ultimately more important than whether they get the pub.

A final comment: Peer-reviewed journals differ dramatically in their quality. If you don't know what the good journals are, you should expect that your reading will include a bunch of crap that no serious person in the field would pay attention to. Why these crap journals even exist is a mystery to me.

Not necessarily. You can compare dead trees in the same vicinity that were alive at overlapping time intervals. Patterns in the width of the rings will reveal the period over which their lives overlapped. With enough dead trees, if they are preserved well enough, you could go back significantly further and age trees that are long dead.