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Comment by BonoboBoner | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think the academic publishing mechanisms are broken. It takes so much time for your idea and research to be visible... you write the paper, it get reviewed, presented on a conference, published in journals and then months/years later someone actually sees it.

Compare that to the web, where an elaborate blog post and a project on GitHub is enough to become visible to the entire world within hours.

Percentage wise, how much influence did academic papers have on your day to day work in the last year compared to new stuff you found on the web?

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I'm trying to understand your concern. While the general public may not interface with new research until it gets published, the researcher's colleagues typically hear about big findings within weeks, or at worst months (conferences).

If you're not in field X, you won't hear about new research until later. But if you're not in field X, how often does it matter that you weren't on the bleeding edge of something in that field?

Is there any reason why publications can't be publicly available before they are reviewed? The journals could still play the same role, highlighting the most significant publications. I'm not an academic so I'm not familiar with the feedback process between a journal and a paper's author. Is there any reason that any refinements couldn't take place in public. A version of github focused on academic papers would seem like a good model.

When a paper fits into one of the categories arXiv accepts, that's more or less what happens (modulo the cranks who claim to prove Riemann's hypothesis every now and then, but that's a whole different topic :)

The difficulty is that some publishers don't allow you to make pdfs of the final versions of papers freely available. Of course, you can always publish draft versions, which is not entirely a bad thing.

There's nothing preventing professors from posting papers to their website or the arXiv.

I imagine you could incorporate revisions if you liked. (And my "I imagine", I mean "I did this when I published papers in the past".) This is probably against the letter of the copyright agreement, but I don't give a damn, and AFAIK publishers don't dare go after people who do this.

Perhaps as a counterexample: in my day to day work, I write numerical code. Academic papers are still a better influence as compared to stuff that can be found directly on the web. To be fair, given that a lot more academics are making their work available on their websites, and I can see where this situation might reverse in the not-so-distant future.

It is as bad as you say in many of the humanities, but the sciences have a preprint culture that makes ideas visible as soon as they are written up.

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