Academia is in a time for reckoning. Actors who already went through the process (or otherwise) gained sufficient reputation or credentials to self-market thei

Academia is in a time for reckoning. Actors who already went through the process (or otherwise) gained sufficient reputation or credentials to self-market their own paper can skip journals entirely. That was what OpenAI did. With a sufficiently powerful AI model and correctional pipelines, generating a paper is trivial given some insight. I think we should be reminded that papers are a channel to distribute papers. Editors are unpaid now, but the economics of a journals are such that the editors are incentivized to curate or distribute papers to schools that pay for the paper. Some perceive quality as a core metric for this. However, in my experience of dealing with computational biology, a paper in so and so journal hardly means a stamp of quality as compared to a paper in some github repo with code to reproduce the paper. This, simply, is broken, because journals and peer reviewers cannot guarantee that data and results in the paper is correct (assuming that it is not maths or theoretical) without reproducing the results in the paper. None of these are helpful towards students who are already struggling to keep up with the cadence of producing papers.