They always have been able to. It's called a blog, personal or company.

But everyone knows why "serious research" isn't mostly published on blogs:

Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel. Don't publish? No postdoc for you. No professorship for you. No grant approval or news coverage.

Do publish in an academic journal? All the work you did, all the IP you invented, is assigned to the university and/or the grant funder. You're basically a non-shareholder: a contractor.

Researchers who do publish on their own tend to be viewed as cranks, since they generally don't use "journalese" and aren't required to cite from the same pool of "officially published" articles. Consequently, they also can't really get cited outside of the blogosphere - a blog post isn't "legitimate literature."

Researchers who don't publish in official journals and are labeled cranks generally can't afford to do research long term.

So how do you divorce yourself from academia?

Start a research company or project

Get funding via grants, product sales, donations

Use your research to directly build products and get a return on R&D invested

Decide to not publish your research in the open because doing so would take away the information asymmetry keeping you ahead of the competition

Oops, you are no longer publishing.

I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them, and a pity too, because it was probably correct.

To be honest and judging by the amount and quality of emails I receive weekly from people claiming to have a discovery or sharing this last unification theory, this is a safe assumption. The problem that peer-review solve it not to waste your valuable little time seeing if this is following reasonable scientific methods or not. It does not tell you that this wrong or correct.

I ready about 30 papers weekly (below average) and I spend 2 days out of my week reading them. This without having to read anything, it would be a much worse situation where I have to read too many just to find that many of them are just written by cranks.

Someone can say we can can pay for people to have some sort of verified aggregate feed of articles. Yes that is possible and congratulations, you just reinvented peer-review system.

> I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them

My strong guess is that your advisor was wrong (or you misunderstood him). I've often seen citations to random web sites. Even citations to conversations. The purpose of citation is to give credit, not rack up points.

Perhaps he was saying it was too risky to base your work off of some blog post, as his work was not yet "established" because it hadn't been published.

I think it depends on how the reference is used. Something like “here is a proof or an explanation, it’s great and I am going to repeat it here but it came from that website over there so don’t think I came up with it” is very different from “there is a proof over there so I will accept it as true and you should too” (i.e., how citations tend to be used most of the time, unfortunately).

Even as a referee I would be happy with the former, provided that there is a permanent link or a pdf of the webpage in the supplementary material. I really would not let the latter fly.

> is very different from “there is a proof over there so I will accept it as true and you should too” (i.e., how citations tend to be used most of the time, unfortunately).

I have seen exactly this. A (famous) professor at my university had a manuscript for a textbook that he had been working on for years, but had not yet published. A number of people wrote papers citing the (unpublished) book.

Of course, this is a bit of an outlier as the author had over the years given people drafts of his book.

Still, I would say that as long as the referee can access the web site and verify it, it should be allowed (and I'll still assert that it has been allowed on numerous occasions). May vary with discipline, though.

> Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel.

I...think the causality on this is wrong.

"Publish or perish" long predates Elsevier's rapacious consumption of journals. The reason they did that in the first place is because they already knew it was, in effect, a captive audience.

At the present moment it doesn't much matter how it started.

Before Elsevier, journal articles or "letters" were just correspondence between individual researchers. The big publishers got into it later.

Grant application and advancement in scientific careers. As a junior researcher, you either publish in impactful peer reviewed journals or you don’t get your PhD. As a senior researcher, you either publish in impactful peer reviewed journals or your PhD student doesn’t get the PhD degree (this hurts both of you). Moreover, you won’t get grants so you can’t even hire a PhD student in the first place.

While scientists’ prestige might be a part of the equation, it’s mostly the academic leaderships and fonds that have brought us here.

It's a filter thing.

Free platforms let anyone post anything without any filter. Clearly that results in a lot of rubbish being included.

As the signal to noise ratio increases the value of the platform decreases. I can publish anything I like on my blog, but my blog has no reputation compared to a million other blogs.

Of course filtering is expensive, biased, sometimes wrong, limits access to information and so on. The current academic system is pretty "broken".

But just making all articles free to post, free to read, isn't the solution. We have that already and it's terrible. (Facebook, YouTube et al.)

Ultimately we still need filtering - and thats the hard problem that needs solving.

Filtering should happen after publication, and be built into platforms like ArXiv.

I would suggest that it's hard to do that as an afterthought. If the internet has shown us anything it's that public curating of material seldom allows quality to float to the top.

And when filtering, or curating, is exercised then the argument swings between "untrue" on one side and "censored" on the other.

Simply saying "it should all be open" without acknowledging, or worse without understanding, the real harm that approach could bring is to bring an overly simplistic solution to a hard problem.

> It's a filter thing.

I'm reminded of this quote from Ben Thompson:

In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened.

Instead of filter, I tend to say curate. There are so many papers being created no institution has the time to vet and curate. They want to use open access repositories and journals, but they don't want to bring hundreds of thousands unvetted papers and books into their local catalogs.

There's also the prestige of certain journals, but like you touched on, at a meta level that's just curation. Citations and other scorings are attempts to address this issue, but those end up heavily weighted towards older publications that it's hard for new, possibly better research to bubble up.

The ML community is much less dependent on government granting agencies than most other fields. A typical ML paper on arXiv will have at least one and often many corporate funded researchers. Problems like h-index hacking are a disease created by grant giving: take away the government grants and people lose the incentive to engage in that kind of scientific fraud, as they'd only be defrauding their own employers. Who, you can bet, actually are reading the papers.

> take away the government grants and people lose the incentive to engage in that kind of scientific fraud

And the incentives and resources to engage in scientific activities in case of other fields.

On the other hand, the ML community is especially big on papers with cherry picked results and things that can't be replicated.

It's a funding thing - if you don't publish in highly-filtered places, you don't get grants so you can't do science; no one will pay for you, your students and your equipment if you only publish on ArXiv.

> Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print like ArXiv?

In my field, Arxiv has too many really suboptimal manuscripts, too much garbage, and is not well indexed. Looking for decent stuff is hard. I would really like our institution’s library to pay someone to sift through Arxiv full time and compile lists of decent articles regularly. Like how they used to do when you had to physically go to a library to even get the titles of published articles. This was enough of a hassle to make bibliography lists valuable. But yeah in the meantime, it’s too expensive in terms of wasted time compared to even Google Scholar.