alt Hacker News> We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.
In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.
If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).
I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.
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In my field, journals subsist precisely as targets for a PhD. 3 journal publications and you can become a doc.
Yes exactly. Right now they are arbiters of quality but they shouldn't be, and the move towards Open Access is changing their role.
I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.
For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.
I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.