Actually I totally botched the intent of my first message. My point is that the publication process is used as a reputation metric, which is something the resea

Actually I totally botched the intent of my first message. My point is that the publication process is used as a reputation metric, which is something the research world (not science) needs. It needs it for valid purposes and using number of citations and impact factor for it is a hack that is now becoming very noisy due to the various exploits that can be made to this metric. The publication+review+reproduction process is fine to discover scientific fact, I totally agree.