(I also post the PDFs and links to code on my website, as well.)
> What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020?
Partly peer review, partly signaling game, and partly exposition/advertisement/reach of papers. Those are, of course, all intimately linked in scientific fields.
> I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics
I think a lot of them have taken the Twitter route! There are a few who also have their own somewhat-updated blogs (myself included).
> I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture.
The problem is kind of general, though: (a) writing good, useful blog posts takes a long time, especially when attempting to distill the topic even further for a general audience, and (b) writing (good) papers really does take a long time. (Of course, there are many, many poorly-written papers, but, unless the results are truly incredible, almost nobody spends time deciphering them.)
For example, I think I'm a fairly fast/decent academic writer, yet on a given paper, I spend roughly half of the time doing research and the other half of the time finding the right presentation/abstraction to present, along with writing and editing a given exposition to make it clear and legible. Any given paper will take me ≥20 total hours in structuring, writing, and editing (not including research hours). Reviews can take ≥40.
Depending on the field, this is often the case. Here are some examples from both of the labs I'm in, with PDFs available:
https://stanford.edu/~boyd/papers.html
https://nqp.stanford.edu/journal-publications
(I also post the PDFs and links to code on my website, as well.)
> What’s the role of an academic journal in 2020?
Partly peer review, partly signaling game, and partly exposition/advertisement/reach of papers. Those are, of course, all intimately linked in scientific fields.
> I’d love to see more blogging from hard science academics
I think a lot of them have taken the Twitter route! There are a few who also have their own somewhat-updated blogs (myself included).
> I’m wondering if there’s a reason why that’s challenging or if it’s just academic culture.
The problem is kind of general, though: (a) writing good, useful blog posts takes a long time, especially when attempting to distill the topic even further for a general audience, and (b) writing (good) papers really does take a long time. (Of course, there are many, many poorly-written papers, but, unless the results are truly incredible, almost nobody spends time deciphering them.)
For example, I think I'm a fairly fast/decent academic writer, yet on a given paper, I spend roughly half of the time doing research and the other half of the time finding the right presentation/abstraction to present, along with writing and editing a given exposition to make it clear and legible. Any given paper will take me ≥20 total hours in structuring, writing, and editing (not including research hours). Reviews can take ≥40.