Academic papers today are not meant to be discussion forums. To be fair, undergrads and early-stage graduate students often use academic papers as a way to figu

Academic papers today are not meant to be discussion forums. To be fair, undergrads and early-stage graduate students often use academic papers as a way to figure out what kind of debates are taking place in their field. But once you get into advanced levels, academic papers are little more than archives of discussions that you had many months and years ago. All the real discussion happens in labs, offices, colloquiums, conferences, by e-mail, and through countless other channels that everyone knows are much more efficient than academic papers. Only those who are relatively isolated from the rest of the academic community, like scientists working far away from major research centers, rely on academic papers to catch up with what everyone else is up to. Also, sometimes it doesn't matter that the paper gets published a few months or even a couple of years late. Not every academic field progresses at the rate of cutting-edge science. In my philosophy PhD dissertation I criticized works that were 10-16 years old, and even older if you count how long they took to be published. But those works are still considered a hot topic in their field. Hardly surprising in a discipline that has been moving slowly and steadily for thousands of years. The same might be said of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. So whether or not papers can be a suitable discussion forum depends on the field and how people expect their discussion forum to work. Blanket statements that cover everything from philosophy to mathematics to the latest nanotechnology are not helpful. Some of the other problems you mention, though, are real.