> If you (somehow) prevented me from distributing my preliminary results

Dude, nobody can prevent you from putting your paper on arxiv. But arxiv is a vanity press-I'm sorry to put it in such negative terms, but that's the God's honest truth of it.

We have free speech; you can get a vanity press to print whatever you want, as fast as you want it to. But that is not doing science. Alas, arxiv is needed, because the rest of the system is so broken. But imagine if you could submit your paper to any journal, and be guaranteed that it would be peer reviewed within 2 weeks. We could do that if we didn't have to rely on volunteer labor, but paid qualified people to do the job thoroughly and on time.

> Having fast and efficient channels for publishing our results

Have you ever submitted a paper to a journal? If so, I'm sure you were as frustrated as I was that my paper was just sitting on reviewers desks for a year before they got around to giving it a cursory glance.

If we actually payed reviewers, we could specify that the reviews must be done on a certain time schedule. My proposal would greatly accelerate the rate at which non-fraudulent, scientific results get published and communicated to other researchers.

> I strongly object to any proposal that would interrupt this essential process.

Its not an essential process to science to pick the fastest and cheapest vanity press.

What essential for science is getting repeatable results. That's science.

> Having fast and efficient channels for publishing

Ever faster publishing of ever more vanity projects is not science, nor does it help science. Quite the opposite.

> it's obvious that when you say publication you don't mean it in the literal sense of communicating scientific results.

No, that's exactly what I mean. But putting something up on arxiv isn't "communicating scientific results." Until it has been peer reviewed and shown to be replicable, it just isn't a scientific result.

> [change metric, etc]

I don't want to change the metric. We don't have a bad metric--we have frauds claiming they have met the metric when they haven't. The problem isn't with the metric, its that the metric isn't actually being enforced like it should be.

> any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.

Peer reviews and replications are not a measure of how good your science is. The measure for good vs poor science are things like how useful your results are, how general they are, whether they unify previously disconnected areas of knowledge...things like that.

Whether you are generating repeatable results or not isn't the difference between poor science and good science. It's the the difference between doing science and not doing science.

You can't get rid of peer review, and the demand for repeatable results and still be doing science. Science is the the process of getting peer reviewed and repeatable results.

Peer review and repeatability isn't how you judge the results of the race--they are the bare minimum requirements to enter the race to begin with.

> your proposal really has nothing to do with scientific publication for its first-order effects (i.e., distributing results to colleagues)

Distributing what results? If your "results" can't pass peer review, or they can't be replicated, the are not scientific results. If you skip those steps, you are are skipping doing science. You are not a scientist, you are just cosplaying a scientist.

In order to deliver scientific results, quickly or slowly, you actually have to have produced scientific results.

> if you want to reform the way credit is allocated, why not focus explicitly on that goal?

Well, I'm not trying to reform the way credit is allocated. I'm trying to stop people from getting credit for fraudulent results. Before credit is allocated, something credible must have been produced!! And until your paper passes peer review, it is not credible, and until it has been replicated, its not science.

> that real scientists will instantly work around.

Even calling them "real scientists" betrays a deep conceptual error. There are not "real scientists" and "other kinds of scientists." There are scientists, and there are non-scientists.

The distinction isn't between "real scientists" who take every shortcut and cheat as much as they can get away with, and "poor schlubby scientists" who don't have the guts to cheat.

Scientists (not "real scientists", just scientists) insist on peer review and reproducible results. You can't "work around" the most basic criteria for something be scientific and still be a scientist doing science.

> just .... convince them to stop hiring/funding/firing researchers using the metrics they currently use

So...I'm supposed go to the national science foundation, and every body which funds scientific research, every institution which purports to hire scientists---and somehow convince them to stop actually doing science?

sigh its not your fault man. The problem has been going on for so long now, that there are generations of cosplayer-professors, who have been graduating cosplayer-ph.d.s. Imagine people going to Star Trek conventions, dressing up, geeking out---but after few generations they forget that they are cosplaying, and think they are actually on a starship....

Seems ludicrous, but that's kind of what arxiv has inadvertently done. It doesn't help that have people who cosplay being "science" journalists or "science" popularizers, who trawl arxiv for juicy headlines, and happily write up an article about "research" which hasn't been peer reviewed or replicated. It just encourages more race-to-the bottom, by encouraging "researchers" to post exaggerated claims.