[mmooss]

I definitely want journals to be arbiters of quality. I have very limited time and want to read the best, and at the same time I don't want to read misinformation or disinformation.

They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.

[heisenbit]

Maybe we should pay the ones that put in the work and leverage their experience to judge the quality which would be the reviewers. In this age of disintermediation journals add little value in providing infrastructure or paying (if at all) reviewers and that money is in any case mostly public money.

[rorytbyrne]

> Who else do you suggest and why are they better?

The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day. The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many possible mechanisms.

For example, I follow a weekly reading list (https://superlab.ca) published by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those people are my arbiters of quality.

I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.

[mmooss]

That sounds fine, though I'd add the consideration that the further someone is from your field, the more that an arbiter and a highly filtered reading list become necessities. A scholar in another field isn't part of the daily conversation in yours and doesn't have time to get involved or read up on on it - and, without arbiters, they'd need to do in every field except their own. And the scientifically literate public has no hope - will they find the Western University list? For every field they're interested in? And read every list in every field?

A few central arbiters of the best research - e.g. Nature and Science - make science accessible outside your field, and outside professional science. Even reading those two publications is too much every week, with all the other reading, other activities, family, responsibilties, etc. on top of career.

> I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.

I don't care if it's journals, though people often assume that shifting power away from the current flawed institution to a new one will resolve the problems. The probems are inherent to power itself. We need a different structure with different incentives if we want a different outcome.