To respond to this particular point, I'm not familiar with any characteristics of the academic journal system which prevent these problems either. Name recognition is often key to getting into competitive journals, which is just another way of calling it an easily gamed popularity contest.
He was later admitted to Cambridge for a PhD and sent the exact same paper (same formatting, content, layout but different department/uni). It was immediately accepted. Does it necessarily mean that scientists in poorer countries are doing bad science? Or just that they didn't get their visa / couldn't leave their country / just want to stay there, etc.
The first filter most editors use is: "Do I know this research group? Are they part of the club? Have they published in top journals?". If not, it won't get read (unless it's a compelling and exciting title and abstract).
Double blind doesn't always work, sometimes it's painfully obvious who the PI is, but it should stop stuff like this from happening.
> We are no longer able to accede to requests from authors that we withhold their identities from the referees. Such "double-blind" reviewing has been discontinued. [0]
[0] https://journals.aps.org/prl/authors/editorial-policies-prac...
But the argument is that "giving other researchers the ability to rate ... [would work] just as well as this journal reputation system".
My question is, simply, why should I believe this?
Bibliometrics often look at citations. Citations are, yes, a marker of popularity and social connections, but also have certain scholastic requirements. Editors and reviewers can and do point out missing references or highlight too many irrelevant self-citations. This is a type of moderation system. Imperfect certainly, but it does provide some grounding.
Also, it's not like the scientific publication system only contains original research papers. Review papers fill a curational role, with the advantage of a single voice (even if from co-authors) making the comparisons, so I at least have a relatively constant baseline.
On the other hand, I've always been suspicious that people can reliably guess the authors when doing a blinded review. I've seen one study that said 30% of reviewers (in a small sample) could do so, but that hardly seems like a reason to abandon the idea altogether.
I don't see a problem with this. If you want public money, you have to put your work in the public domain. That's just a condition of getting the money.
The NIH does this. If you receive a single penny from an NIH grant, the work must be posted to PubMed.
So if you publish a paper titled "XYZ" in a journal and also put it on your blog, making sure your blog is visible to search engines - anyone searching for the paper's title "XYZ" will find it for free on your blog?
(I'm not involved with the science community)
Note that my comment concerned the proposal "why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications". Your proposal replaces "instead" with "in addition to".
LOL! No. Ratings are nearly useless. By which I mean I don't know how I would incorporate ratings into my own research.
How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed? Does a "5.2" for a 1995 paper have the same meaning as a "5.2" for a 2010 paper?
"You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications"
Do tell me how. Post on my blog and hope people come across it?
Journals outsource marketing. Get rid of journals and something must replace that service, or I have to become a marketer.
"This system is a product of a bygone era .. relying on copyright"
You are mistaken. The system does not rely on copyright. The scientific publication system dates from the 1600s, dated from Oldenburg's 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'. Copyright dates from the 1700s, dated from the Statute of Anne.
The scientific publication system depends on reliable selection and curation. Its current form is dominated by large publishing companies which use copyright law for revenue generation, but that's only been true for the last few decades. Scientific publication also existed in the USSR even without copyright protection. (article 103(2) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un... gave "permission to reproduce published scientific, artistic, or literary works as excerpts (or even entirely) in scientific, critical, or educational publications").
"most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it."
I understand and sympathize with your argument. But in practice things aren't so clear cut. Rarely does the money come 100% from public sources. Is your argument that even 1 cent of public funding means the entire work product must be in the public domain?
Are you making the moral argument that copyright should to the funding source? Or is it limited only to public funding sources? For example, if 100% of the money for a project comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, then do you want the foundation to control the copyright the work product? What if it's 80% Gates and 20% public funded? Is it public domain then?
If 3 years of research was publicly funded, and resulted in paper, and 2 more years was privately funded by BigCorp., to analyze the data further, then must that additional two years also be in the public domain?
And on and on. Unless "1 cent => public domain always", then there's no clear line. Is that your argument?
(BTW, there is another clear line - work by a US government employee is in the public domain. A small percentage of the scientific papers are in the public domain because of that.)