[impendia]

In mathematics, at least, papers and preprints are indeed widely considered to be the same thing. In practice, for people working in the field, they are.

Math papers tend to be highly technical, read by other specialists in the field. When it comes for correctness -- whether or not I should take a paper with a grain of salt -- the authors' reputation counts for much more than the journal's. And in case of student authors, who are just beginning to publish, the advisor is implicitly staking their reputation on the work as well.

There are also preprints on the arXiv, written by people unknown in the community, claiming to prove the Riemann Hypothesis or some such. These aren't taken seriously by anyone.

An outsider might not be able to tell which preprints can be considered equivalent to papers, but such people are not likely to be seriously reading math research in the first place.

[eru]

You can always overlay a reputation system on top of your pre-print server.

The informal one you describe here, or any formal one you can come up with.

[kelipso]

Arxiv has been working just fine for a long time, there's no need to change it. Besides I'm not going to voluntarily post my work so I can get publicly rated by a bunch of unknowns lol.

[markhahn]

You're thinking of social-media-type "reputation".

Instead, think of the goal being to associate measures of worth with the reviewers. If you're publicly rated by a bunch of worthwhile people, count yourself lucky.

[eru]

> Arxiv has been working just fine for a long time, there's no need to change it.

Exactly, that's why I am not suggesting any change to Arxiv.

Think more of people eg submitting Arxiv URLs to Hacker News for what I have in mind. Or discussing Arxiv submission on a forum or in a wiki etc. You can imagine some specialised software that has some better support specifically for material from Arxiv.

That's what I mean by 'overlay'.

Or think of Slatestarcodex publishing a blog post with links to his favourite Arxiv papers for that month. That's pretty much equivalent to what a journal produces. And if Slatestarcodex compiles that link list by doing some peer review and chatting with the authors of the papers, that's almost exactly what the journal does.