Thanks, I wasn't aware of the level of peer review of physics journals in the early 20th century. Note that Annalen der Physik was publishing 90-95% of submissi

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the level of peer review of physics journals in the early 20th century. Note that Annalen der Physik was publishing 90-95% of submissions, so there was still some review process. I also wonder how much of that had to do with the average quality of a researcher working in physics back then, since physics was still a specialized pursuit of a very small number of people. We have orders of magnitude more people working in science today, so it might not be feasible for journals to publish 90-95% of submissions without a significant drop in quality. I think the solution is for more fields to adopt the model that most of math/CS/physics already follows. Put everything up on preprint servers and allow people to cite preprints. That way the community can accept ideas and build on them regardless of whether a specific paper makes it into published journals.