On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Anonymous wrote:
There is a reason why the peer review process and the academic journals are still needed. Online preprint archives are useless for the layman.
Laymen don't read online preprint archives. They stick with popular science stuff (I read Science). If you're even marginally competent the kooks have a telltale signature, allowing you to filter out 90% of kook science with a cursory glance. Names-based reputation is prevalent (I guess no one has yet bothered to fake submissions often enough so that people use digital signatures to authenticate authors of submitted papers) and seems to work. Typically everybody knows everybody else in a small speciality, and newcomers are very visible as such. They either rapidly establish a reputation track as valuable contributors, or fail to do so. Informally, that distributed database seems to work well. It is very easy to offer a for-profit peer review service of arXiv.org, btw (just offer a number of arXiv links digitally signed to your identity to paid subscribers). It's just there is not a market for it still, because the dead tree media are hogging the ecological niche for it, having been there first. You need a reputation track before people come to you, and you only get a reputation track if people come to you.
Only experts can use these archives with safety; they are able to sift the wheat from the chaff.