Google Scholar, Arxiv and Researchgate make a pretty robust solution for paper discovery

They don't provide a good solution for filtered/ranked paper discovery, one where someone else sorts the papers so you have to skim through less garbage. For paper discovery the main problem is the overabundance of noise, not the ability to find everything (which is indeed solved already). There are excellent papers both on Arxiv as well as in (for example) NeurIPS proceedings, and there is is trash both on Arxiv as well as in NeurIPS proceedings; but the signal-to-noise ratio is vastly different. And the effect of the 25%-ish acceptance rate in many publication venues is not just cutting out 75% of the papers, because for each rejected paper there's probably two (or a dozen?) more which don't even get submitted there because the authors know it'll get rejected, so such a filter removes 90% or more of papers in a manner that's correlated (definitely imperfectly, but still meaningfully) to whether you'd want to read or skim them.

> If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.

arXiv is an emerging solution. The peer review bit is missing.

https://arxiv.org/category_taxonomy

ArXiv.org Reaches a Milestone and a Reckoning 2022:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arxiv-org-reaches...

It would be good if arxiv somehow standardised how to capture methodology. E.g. population size, sample size, sample selection method, computed values to demonstrate outcome, etc etc, to make review as easy as possible. And then if the computed values are successfully challenged, they can be updated and the trust in the paper's conclusions adjusted.

Also missing are viable costs. If arXiv didn't have the support of some nonprofit societies and grants from foundations, it would be in significant trouble.

This may be naive but, doesn't Sci-Hub provide visibility?

The search on sci-hub is not great. It is best when you know the DOI of what you want.

Didn't sci-hub stop adding new papers? Has that changed?

Still going on until the lawsuit in India is resolved.

I have a couple papers I have been trying to get for almost a year. Can't get them on Sci-Hub and the authors never responded when I asked directly.