(I agree with the parent poster, but this seems like the right place to add the following.) One thing that people who claim "the scarcity is gone, let's just p

(I agree with the parent poster, but this seems like the right place to add the following.) One thing that people who claim "the scarcity is gone, let's just publish everything" do miss is that there still is a scarcity: The time and attention of researchers. Let me expand a bit on that from my own field of studying reconnection in astrophysical plasma. As you can tell from the description it is not a well defined closed topic. Instead there is tons of more or less adjacent fields. The study of solar flares (which might be triggered by reconnection), the study of coronal heating (the heat might be due to magnetic field getting converted to heat by reconnection), astronomical observations of AGN jets (reconnection might be what produces energetic particles there that we see in the SDE of those sources), observations of pulsar wind nebulae (the energetic particles there might have been accelerated at the termination shock. or due to reconnection), observations of giant pulses in (some) pulsars (that might be due to reconnection at the Y point of the current sheet just outside the light cylinder) and so on. On top of the related physical topics I need to keep on top of development methods in the simulation method I use (particle in cell codes) and in several related simulation methods (either because improvements there might make them viable to study reconnection which wasn't possible before, or because the neat new trick in method X might also improve the characteristics in PiC codes). If I wanted to I could spend easily 100 hours per week just reading papers. But staying current with the field is just 5 or maybe 10 percent of my job. So what I do is the following: Papers that fall close enough to my special topic I will read. All of them. I will actually print them out, annotate them, go over them with a fine toothed comb. For many other papers I will read the abstracts (10 to 50 each morning) to find the 1 or 2 paper that are worth reading. And this is where selection by the editors and limitations to publications come in. They rank important papers. I am much more likely to read "a novel approach to plasma simulation" if it was accepted into the Astrophysical Journal than if it just appears on ArXiv. Because ApJ does not like pure code papers. So if it made the cut 2 or 3 experts in the field deemed it worth the time of the community. Now that doesn't mean that all ArXiv papers are bad, that we should publish less or anything like that. When I talk to a colleague and ask about a technical detail I am SOOOO happy when they say "it's in the Arxiv paper ID 1906.bla". And on the other hand there is the notion of "it was in Nature but it still might be right". Bottom line is: Do not discount the sorting by topic (numerical vs observational vs theoretical), impact ("here is one data point" vs "here is a completely new approach") and quality ("I'm not too convinced, but maybe it gives somebody an idea" vs "holy smokes how did we all miss that!") that journals provide. Any better, future alternative needs this sorting and ranking. Just dumping it onto the internet is not the solution.