Each to their own in this debate, but I find the arguments about "too many papers" dubious, given that many problems many people work on have no prior building blocks. To this end, Hannah's comment seems good:
> "Hannah Hope, the open research lead at the Wellcome Trust, said in general, research that was good enough to fund should be published [...]"
Though, she has some weird attachment to funding, which too is often a similar lottery. That said, her subsequent take is more to the point:
"'I’m sure peer review does lead to improvement in research. Is it always worth the time that goes into it? I think it's something that we should be questioning as a field, and whether peer review happens in the current format on everything,' she said."
In other words, maybe it would indeed be better if people would decide themselves what to read, value, and cite. On average, I would also argue that a sample from arXiv is of better quality than a sample from a commercial, "peer reviewed" repository, supposedly because the former largely lacks incentives for fraud, gamification, and the like. The same goes for the prestige game. Repositories like arXiv also facilitate the perspective of communication, which has also been raised here frequently.
jruohonen•6mo ago
> "Hannah Hope, the open research lead at the Wellcome Trust, said in general, research that was good enough to fund should be published [...]"
Though, she has some weird attachment to funding, which too is often a similar lottery. That said, her subsequent take is more to the point:
"'I’m sure peer review does lead to improvement in research. Is it always worth the time that goes into it? I think it's something that we should be questioning as a field, and whether peer review happens in the current format on everything,' she said."
In other words, maybe it would indeed be better if people would decide themselves what to read, value, and cite. On average, I would also argue that a sample from arXiv is of better quality than a sample from a commercial, "peer reviewed" repository, supposedly because the former largely lacks incentives for fraud, gamification, and the like. The same goes for the prestige game. Repositories like arXiv also facilitate the perspective of communication, which has also been raised here frequently.
Ref.:
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/09/peer-review-h...