[skosuri]

1. Plenty of scientists do. In biology, medRxiv and bioRxiv are pretty popular. For example, all publications from my lab are first put there (www.kosurilab.org/publications.html). If we have smaller pieces of work, we tend to just open source them. It's not widespread practice, but it's definitely not uncommon.

2. Plenty of good blogs, open source results & protocols, a strong github community in academia. Again, not widespread, but not uncommon either.

3. The role of academic journal is attention. There are heirachy of journals meant to signal quality, and they are hard to get into. They are very very useful as a signal for future career prospects (much in the same way as going to a good school).