The paper as way to publish information is rooted in a world that no longer exists. That world consisted of scientists accessing information in printed form through libraries that subscribed to relevant magazines, journals, and what not from publishers. That's still a thing as far as publishers are concerned but I rarely set foot in a library after Google became a thing last century.

The last thirty years have changed that game to basically no longer involve printing (other than for a very few select publications) and basically switching to a digital only publishing form.

I completed my phd, read thousands of papers (well skimmed mostly, it's a fine art to zoom in on the relevant stuff), all without visiting the library more than once or twice. I only printed the ones actually worth reading in detail. And these days I consume vast amounts of information on screen without ever using a printer. My printer is fifteen years old and I just installed the second toner cartridge I ever bought for it.

Yet we still pretend to have "journals" like we're in the 19th century. It's the equivalent to writing your friend a letter to inform them that your train is delayed by 5 minutes. Most sane people use some kind of instant messaging tool for that. Writing letters of course used to be a primary way to communicate for scientists. That too has stopped being a thing. People use email now.

The whole point of publishing is to convey information in a form that's convenient to the reader and to solicit endorsement from your peers (via peer review). Peer review used to be implied by virtue of an editor choosing to select a certain paper for publishing. That in turn implies they would have consulted a number of peers about the suitability of that paper. It's sort of the super tedious equivalent of a soliciting a thumbs up button in a social network.

If you publish on linkedin because you are some kind of wannabe influencer you basically need to get people to 1) read your stuff and 2) click the like or share button. Scientific publishing basically is not that different. You have wannabe scientist that want to get the attention of the influencers (reputable peers) so people will be convinced they know their shit. This ultimately translates into degrees, research funding, and tenure track positions. The whole process is kind of biased towards metrics because that's how universities choose to allocate their money.

An ambitious scientist behaves basically in a similar way as a linkedin influencer and will try to game the system by flooding the system with a lot of content and getting their buddies to sign off on it. There are a lot of mediocre articles that get published in obscure places with cliques of scientists basically doing each other favors by referencing each other's work; or worse self referencing. In linkedin terms, this would be the absolute drivel that nobody likes that gets re-shared by a few people that also don't manage to produce much content of interest.

So, here's a thought, maybe get this a bit more out in the open and give scientists some modern tools to endorse each other's work. The best endorsement is a reference. A link basically. Tracking links between bits of paper is super tedious. These papers need permanent URLs. And they need to be digitally signed by their authors so we can have some authenticity and prevent cheating. And scientists need a place where scientists can debate and exchange thoughts about these papers. That used to be a big tradition between scientist back when they still wrote letters to each other or used journals to criticize each other's work.

Curating and aggregating work by means of linking to it is a job that should not be reserved for fussy editors of non paper based journals that absolutely nobody ever reads cover to cover. HN for science; why not? Why not have a multitude of websites referring, editorializing and commenting on published work? How is that not a thing?