[bglazer]

It’s an appealing vision. Distributing the early review process across time and the whole community would solve a lot of problems with the current model.

I do suspect that this would strengthen the winner-takes-all dynamics in academic publishing. Like whoever has the biggest twitter following gets all the attention, then gets Nature and Science competing for their paper, which allows them to get funding to hire a publicist, who increases their profile.

[brutusborn]

I suspect the opposite since winner-take-all-dynamics are partly driven by gatekeeping. A famous scientist (like Francesca Gino) gains a following _because_ she is anointed by journals and institutions, which causes positive reinforcement via better jobs / grants / book opportunities etc. If top journals reject a researcher, they languish until they get lucky or the value of their work becomes unquestionable (like Katalin Karikó).

In my utopia, publication success would be driven by interest within a field which means lesser known researchers who haven't had breaks in high impact journals are more likely to break through, because the community acts as the gatekeepers, not a small group of journal editors.