Comment by rhelz

Thanks for this reply, your points are well taken and it really got me to think about this stuff.

I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".

But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.

To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.

But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.

The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.