Yesterday I got an email from a journal asking me to submit a paper. They needed it within 2 weeks. And it would be published 2 weeks thereafter. After I spe

Yesterday I got an email from a journal asking me to submit a paper. They needed it within 2 weeks. And it would be published 2 weeks thereafter. After I spewed coffee through my nose, laughing, I clicked the "spam" button. Publication in real journals is slow; reviewers are asked to send comments within a month, but they often take more than that. Publication in real journals is difficult; the best-ranked journals reject 90 percent of submissions. Publication in real journals is flexible; complicated decisions about how to transform unpublishable into publishable are made in each step along a long, often meandering and complicated, path. The simple answer to the question posed ("why publish in peer-reviewed journals") is that, for many fields, not doing so ends a career. But if the question is, as it seems by comments here and in many conversations I've had with students, "what value do peer-reviewed journals have" the answer is that, for many fields, doing so improves the science for the individual paper, and for the larger corpus.