Imagine HN where you are only allowed to publish your own content and random users would be selected to evaluate your work.

We should try this!

It says "If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, that would remove their need to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to obtain career credentials."

But at least in my field, most of high impact-f journals don't charge any money for publishing there. So the researchers don't really use any significant money on the publishing part.

I don't know how exactly they get their profit (other than the obvious subscription fee they charged the school), but I don't think researcher themselves are paying that (unless of course, by "researchers" you mean universities as the organizations, but then again "find ways to promote your academic work that are independent of the journal it’s published in" will not be relevant since you still need to pay to read other people's publications).

The need to pay "whatever amount of public money a publisher asks" exists because the important researchers choose to publish in those journals instead of other journals where their articles would be freely available.

If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, then one could simply require that they publish somewhere where it's freely available, but it's a bit of a problem since they need to publish in exactly those journals, which happen to be very expensive.

However, in that case, too, the money is not the researcher's. That said, they are the ones that spend it.

In the case of subscription journals, the argument is similar, except that in this case, it's academic libraries who will have to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to be able to access that research. If the researcher could obtain their credentials elsewhere, they would be able to make their work available somewhere where the libraries and the general public would not have to pay to access it.

The question is whether that pays off in the end. That is, do Elsevier and others' papers have the bar high enough that it's absolutely not worth browsing and reading papers outside the commercial publication, or if it's just laziness and convenience acting up by placing trust in these academic publishers. The academics should be aware of the money and power game involved in commercial publishing, so they should be in a position to judge whether there is value to be trusted in it.

See e.g. https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...

So publishing on your own site on arxiv isn't sufficient on it's own, some curation and gatekeeping is essential for academic publishing to work. However, this is not a service that Elsevier et al provides for their payments, this service is provided by uncompensated reviewers from the community.

On the other hand, the ratings are used by the evaluators of science e.g. funding agencies which won't (and can't) evaluate results directly but need some trusted proxy to separate random ramblings from acceptable science, and the prestigeous journals fulfil that function.

Just uploading to the arxiv will not guarantee that your paper has been reviewed.

We could even argue that a purely meritocratic system of publishing will accelerate good quality research as opposed to a reputation based system.

Funding and career advance should be ortogonal to knowledge distribution.

Your Einstein example actually contradicts your point about reputation.

The mistake is using hindsight to judge that paper's quality. Instead, we have to imagine looking at that SR paper as if we lived in 1905 and didn't know if the 26-year-old patent clerk was a crackpot or a genius.

Einstein sent his manuscript to an academic publisher where Max Planck was one of the editors. This is important because MP already had the reputation in physics so his recognition of Einstein's papers' value was taken seriously.[1] The journal itself also had a reputation which was reinforced by the reputation of its editors.

In 1905, Einstein's papers didn't stand on their own. Its dissemination and acceptance was helped along by Max Plank's "stamp of approval".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck#Einstein_and_the_th...