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Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

"But the emergence of the internet largely nullifies that problem. Wide distribution of scientific information no longer requires scientific publishers."

I'm not at all convinced that this is true - people have been saying it for a long time, and it's not manifested itself in a particularly compelling fashion yet.

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I'm in mathematics, and this is very much true in my field. Papers can be, and nearly always are, widely distributed on the Internet (arXiv) before formal publishing. They are widely read, cited, and built upon.

The publishing industry survives because researchers need to put "Published in Journal X" on their CVs. The peer review process also can lead to incremental improvements, and will occasionally catch major errors, but at this point everything other than the stamp of approval is secondary.

Arxiv?

Arxiv, and it's various follow-ons - I think I was one of the first submissions to medRxiv, are excellent as far as they go, but if we take the COVID-19 pandemic as a stress test, they still have a long way to go.

Beyond that, their curation is...lackluster at best, even if we're not talking about gatekeeping, filtering, etc. but just "What if I want to do something other than key word search?"

I find unexpectedly interesting articles all the time reading journals. I have yet to do so for a preprint server unless someone sends it my way, or it ends up on my Twitter feed.

Journals can still do curation of the stuff that's on preprint archives. Some already do. It's a lot less friction than the current model.

> I find unexpectedly interesting articles all the time reading journals.

Interesting. In math, I don't think anyone "reads journals", but lots of people check the arXiv frequently to see what has been posted.

Math is probably the furthest along this particular pathway - which is both a good sign for this being able to work, and also not generalizable.

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