alt Hacker NewsCurrently a kind of rule of thumb is that a PhD student can graduate after approximately 3 papers published in a good peer reviewed venue.
If peer review were to go away, this whole academic system would get into a crisis. It's dysfunctional and has many problems but it's kinda load bearing for the system to chug along.
No hard rule, no crisis.
Maybe we can go back to very opinionated “true” academia,
where there are institutional gatekeepers,
but they mostly get it right on who to award (and not),
vs the current game of
“whoever plays ball with funding sources the best = the best academic”,
which is obviously bullshit.