In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower 'quality' than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.

With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.

[–] ranandtoldthat@beehaw.org 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Peer review is false security, so much bad and fraudulent science gets through, but due to the stamp of authority people are less skeptical. Additionally it's harder to publish good science.

There's a lot of people who understand this better than me who can explain it. Here's one starting point. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Don't get me wrong, it's not a way to solve everything. But an authoritative body can build credibility and hold onto it. People should still be skeptical and still review, but that's a normal part of the scientific process. Knowing what's more and less credible is a normal process of research, and learning to assess credibility is important too. Peer review doesn't need to be torn down as a concept, it just needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, like all processes. This is part of why I mentioned how some journals are more reputable than others - it's a reflection of how often their peer review misses important things, not a reflection of how bullet-proof their science is. Everyone makes mistakes, the goal should always be to make less.

Also, to be clear, I'm talking about the post-research and pre-publish step, not the pre-research proposal step - that form of peer review can fuck right off.

Also of great importance which I should have probably highlighted in my initial post - this is really dependent on the field itself. In medicine people put in effort for that kind of review. I've peer reviewed quite a few papers and I've received really good advice from peer reviewers on some of the papers I'm on. Certainly this can happen in environments where this kind of review isn't necessary, but the institutions that exist do make it a lot easier. An open source self-hosted model would make it really hard to get an idea of how many eyes were on a particular paper, and would make keeping up with continuing education difficult.... of course unless groups of people made their career reviewing everything that emerges and putting together summaries or otherwise helping to sift through the noise.