I think so. Journals are only in use today because that's how scientific reporting was done before the internet. They're still around because institutions and academics need some way of keeping score. What's the point of it all if you can't say you're better than someone else?

Journals could be replaced with something like Wikipedia, but more sophisticated and editing would be a highly controlled process that requires reproducible data and peer review.

Score could be kept with citations. You'd be required to list the work you built on, as we do today, and the authors would receive credit. No citation would be worth more than another. If you published something useful for a particular field or made a major discovery that opened a new field, then your citation count would reflect it.

Perhaps competing labs could both receive citation credit if their results essentially showed the same thing. If nobody could scoop anyone else's work, then cooperation may be encouraged over competition.

The entire wiki would be a public good, funded by governments across the world, free for all to read and for those with the relevant credentials to publicly comment on.

Negative results could also be published. "We had this hypothesis, we tried this, it didn't work out." It'd probably save time and these works could be cited as well. Imagine making a very important mistake that saves everyone time and effort and being rewarded for it.

I also feel like there is opportunity here to expand a particular field's community. Since the wiki would be more free and open, academic silos may have more metaphorical doors, allowing more cross-field dialog.

I could go on, but I think the tools we need already exist, but we're not using them because... tradition. It would be easier, more efficient, and flexible to use some kind of wiki structure than what's currently happening.

Edit: I thought of one more thing. Searching for information could be so easy. Instead of finding a dozen papers (some slightly off topic, some of questionable quality, some poorly written, some your institution isn't subscribed to, etc) and review articles, all of the information could be easily compiled into review wikis. The level of detail could be easily changed depending on what you want and it would all be right there.

The mathmeticians already escaped to ArXiv. It's open.

Everyone email me your results and I will post them to 196 and lemmyshitpost. We will start a grass roots movement. Bowel movement.

Yeah I'm not buying it.

• in academia, there are a lot more mid- and low-tier academics (like me!) than there are high-tier academics, and there are plenty of lower-tier venues and lower-tier institutes. In these tiers, you're not expected to publish at the highest levels.
• in higher-tier academia, once you get tenure (to be precise: once you submit your tenure package) the urgent need for high-impact journal cites is greatly reduced. you write books or something I dunno.
• industry scientists have far fewer publishing requirements. or they write articles for trade mags. One place I interviewed was actively hostile to publishing.
• government-lab scientists, I dunno, I think they write technical articles that they give their sponsors?

The dynamic that u/mIRNAexpert describes does exist, but it's not the whole problem. And like any scientist will tell ya, figuring out the problem is half way to figuring out the solution.

There is a way out. It involves earning a bunch of money by moving into industry. It's a hard job but someone's gotta do it!

Academics "highly intellectual"?

Haha. No-no. They've just garnered knowledge on a topic. The highly intellectual people are paid much more outside of an institution because they can do stuff with that knowledge.