> authors are not the only beneficiaries of a scientific publication. The interests of the reader matter too -- the journal or conference has some duty to serve

> authors are not the only beneficiaries of a scientific publication. The interests of the reader matter too -- the journal or conference has some duty to serve them. > I don't think we should act like scientific publication is only to give authors a line on their CV and the readers' preference is 100% irrelevant In many fields, the reader can go and read what they want in arXiv or a similar repository. And in the fields where this is not the case, it should be. The elite authors that you mention, in particular, shouldn't have any problem to get their papers read by linking them in social networks, starting a blog, etc. While this wasn't the case 50 years ago, right now almost no one reads journals from front to back, people just search for individual papers, and the main purpose of the peer-review process of conferences and journals is basically gatekeeping and providing some signal for career evaluation, i.e., to "give authors a line on their CV". Thus, I don't think there is any reason to judge anything but the paper contents.