Comment by willturman
Comment by willturman 5 days ago
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law exists only for the lower class
In other words, such a structure would not dissuade bad actors with large financial incentives to push something through a process that grants validity to a hypothesis. A fine isn't going to stop tobacco companies from spamming submissions that say smoking doesn't cause lung cancer or social media companies from spamming submissions that their products aren't detrimental to the mental health.
> In other words, such a structure would not dissuade bad actors with large financial incentives to push something through a process that grants validity to a hypothesis.
That's not the right threat model. The existing peer review process is already weak to high-effort but conflicted research.
Instead, the threat model is closer one closer to that of spam, where the submitting authors don't care about the content of their submission at all but need X publications in high-impact outlets for their CV or grant application. Predatory journals exploit this as part of a pay-to-play problem, but the low reputation of those journals limits their desirable impact factor.
This threat model relies on frequent but low-quality submissions, and a submission fee would make taking multiple kicks at the can unviable.