3 ms·
One problem with ideas like this is that the academia is a meritocracy (or at least it attempts to be), and a meritocracy needs merits that can be assessed in a
by jltsiren 2y ago
One problem with ideas like this is that the academia is a meritocracy (or at least it attempts to be), and a meritocracy needs merits that can be assessed in a timely fashion. If people need publications for jobs, promotions, and grants and proper peer review takes too long, they will create a parallel track of publications with lower standards. Over time, the parallel track will become dominant.
That already happened in CS, which inherited slow and thorough journals from mathematics. Because peer review was taking too long, people elevated abstracts in conference proceedings to the status of papers. The idea was that you submitted an extended abstract to a conference with limited peer review. After receiving feedback, you would write the actual paper and submit it to a journal for proper peer review. But because the work was already published in conference proceedings, people often didn't bother with the full paper.
In some countries, administrators resisted this and only considered journal papers real publications. Those administrators were universally reviled by the CS community. Over time, most of them budged and started accepting conference papers as merits. And so CS became a field with lower than average standards for peer review.