> It's a filter thing. I'm reminded of this quote from Ben Thompson: In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce go

> It's a filter thing. I'm reminded of this quote from Ben Thompson: In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened. Instead of filter, I tend to say curate. There are so many papers being created no institution has the time to vet and curate. They want to use open access repositories and journals, but they don't want to bring hundreds of thousands unvetted papers and books into their local catalogs. There's also the prestige of certain journals, but like you touched on, at a meta level that's just curation. Citations and other scorings are attempts to address this issue, but those end up heavily weighted towards older publications that it's hard for new, possibly better research to bubble up.