[advael]

I think this does more harm than good. If there's anything we should have learned from the replication crisis of 2014, a decent amount of "generated" or "satirical" papers scandals, and an essentially constant stream of retractions, merely being published in a prestigious journal is not a great heuristic for whether a result holds up or the methodology was sound. People who want to seriously assess a paper need to read it, no matter what. Reputation by institution may once have been valuable, but as institutions are corrupted by their incentives and names can be bought and sold as part of the shell game of business, this gets worse and worse as a way of actually assessing information. The benefit you tout is on thin ice if it exists at all, and the harm is enormous, to the point where these institutions have lost the support of the overwhelming majority of people who do the research published in them. In practical terms, most researchers already get most of their papers through sources like Sci-Hub or arXiv, or find out about them through search engines or word of mouth, only dealing with the publisher at the point where they already know what they're looking for. This argument simply has no merit

[hoseja]

It's a terrible heuristic, but it's one that is used for a LOT of funding decisions. "You want money? Show me how many papers in Nature you have."

[advael]

And that's the rub, isn't it? Once a player like Nature or Elsevier can entrench itself in the process by which the other institutions function (Like being gatekeepers on the government's merit metrics for funding), they can route around the fact that nearly every working academic doesn't actually want to support their business model by effective fiat

Personally, I think it's always a mistake to build a business into government policy. It uses the government to protect the business from the free market, and the business to protect the government from public influence or public transparency

[mach1ne]

To be clear, I'm not arguing that this is a good system. I'm simply stating that it is the way it is right now. And while these counterforces are indeed gaining traction, they are still far away from toppling the status quo.