> Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv? Depending on the field, this is often the case. Here are some example

> Why don’t research groups just publish to their own websites or directories like arxiv? Depending on the field, this is often the case. Here are some examples from both of the labs I'm in, with PDFs available: https://stanford.edu/~boyd/papers.html https://stanford.edu/~boyd/papers.html https://nqp.stanford.edu/journal-publications https://nqp.stanford.edu/journal-publications (I also post the PDFs and links to code on my website, as well.) > What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020? Partly peer review, partly signaling game, and partly exposition/advertisement/reach of papers. Those are, of course, all intimately linked in scientific fields. > I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics I think a lot of them have taken the Twitter route! There are a few who also have their own somewhat-updated blogs (myself included). > I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture. The problem is kind of general, though: (a) writing good, useful blog posts takes a long time, especially when attempting to distill the topic even further for a general audience, and (b) writing (good) papers really does take a long time. (Of course, there are many, many poorly-written papers, but, unless the results are truly incredible, almost nobody spends time deciphering them.) For example, I think I'm a fairly fast/decent academic writer, yet on a given paper, I spend roughly half of the time doing research and the other half of the time finding the right presentation/abstraction to present, along with writing and editing a given exposition to make it clear and legible. Any given paper will take me ≥20 total hours in structuring, writing, and editing (not including research hours). Reviews can take ≥40.