>Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers.
You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]
With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".
Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.
Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.
Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.
If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does.
Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])
Either the meme that Elsevier employees "do nothing but spell-check LaTeX markup files" is wrong ... or ... it depends on the particular journals in question. For the job listing examples above, one of the job duties is curation of content (e.g. "assessing submitted research papers") and not just copy-editing. So for that Elsevier imprint (Cell Reports), if you submit a paper about "GMO foods proves Darwin Theory of Evolution is Wrong", their unpaid reviewers won't even see it. One of Elsevier's editorial functions is to filter that crap out.
Just because there is a job listing doesn't mean they do the filtering. I've served on several Computer Science conference reviewer committees and I have seen no filtering done whatsoever.
>Computer Science conference reviewer committees and I have seen no filtering done whatsoever.
The published collection of papers from a conference are more like a anthology of the talks given (Springer is common example publisher) rather than a quality curation via rigorous peer-review. A bunch of experts wasting time with unfiltered crap is probably the norm. Virtually none of those conference papers collections have reputations to accumulate "impact".
The prestigious journals like "Cell", "Lancet", or "Journal of the American College of Cardiology" do not forward unfiltered junk papers to reviewers.
Your experience with conferences is a different situation.
You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]
With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".
Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.
Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.
Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.
If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does. Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])
[1] e.g. Nature's submission and approval process: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/get_published/index.htm...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
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