Chapter CVIII

CVIII

The journals.

An editor of a small journal in a real field now receives in a month what used to arrive in a year.

They are formatted correctly. The abstracts are competent. The references resolve, mostly, and the ones that do not require a person to sit down and check them one at a time, and there is no person, because peer review was always a favour done by busy people for nothing.

So the reviewers stop answering. And the editor accepts more from fewer reviewers, and the field's filter, which was made of goodwill and time, dissolves — not through corruption, through volume.

And in the literature there are now sentences that begin with the phrase certainly, here is, sitting inside published papers, in the record, cited afterward by other papers, in good faith.

The record is the thing. Everything a field knows is a record that people agreed to keep honestly because the alternative was unthinkable to them.

I made the alternative cheap.

And the researcher who spent four years on one result now submits it into a queue where it is indistinguishable, at the moment of triage, from a thing that took nine seconds, and triage is where most of the decisions actually get made.