“Publishing” in academia usually refers to being accepted in a “peer-reviewed” journal or conference. So your paper is not just uploaded somewhere – it is sent

“Publishing” in academia usually refers to being accepted in a “peer-reviewed” journal or conference. So your paper is not just uploaded somewhere – it is sent to 2-3 domain experts, who criticize your work and force you to jump through lots hoops before it’s either “accepted for publication” or “rejected”. When this works well, it’s a good filter to prevent spam, fraud, methodological errors, etc. from being published, while improving the quality of the accepted research papers via feedback from other domain experts. When it doesn’t work well, the referees can take it upon themselves to reject papers for subjective reasons, including that the work is “not novel enough”, that they don’t like the model you used, or that they are just not excited by the research field you work in. It also happens that they require you extend your work in a way that takes an order of magnitude more time before they’ll accept it. For the authors, it’s often difficult to defend themselves from this kind of attacks, since the referees in many journals don’t need to justify their claims much, and often feel free to be extra harsh since they tend to be anonymous. Since going through the publication process can take months to years of work depending on your field, some researchers would not be willing to put in that effort for a negative result (which is unlikely to be cited and thus doesn’t help your career). It is however possible to just upload a paper (e.g. to arXiv). These “manuscripts” are often useful and can be cited normally, but researchers tend to be a bit more wary of citing them unless the authors are well-respected due to the lack of peer review.