You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors. Even if we assume that all involved are pure of heart and no one is deliberately delaying publication of their rivals’ work submission to publication in economics is on the order of two years. This is insane so the actual intellectual conversation has moved to working papers with final publication being in a journal being as much for archival and career progression metrics as anything else. I believe the situation in much of computer science is similar, with conference papers serving as the workaround for the fact that pre publication peer review is unbearably slow, not working papers.
Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit.
Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?
> You neglect the costs of submission, revision, resubmisssion etc. which are borne by the authors.
I neglect those because journals in my own field are both free to publish in and, more often than not, open-access. I do understand that not everyone is so fortunate, however.
I’m talking about time, not money. Because those costs absolutely are borne by the authors. Insofar as peer review hinders the free dissemination of ideas it also hurts the scientific community and those who depend on its research.
Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit.
Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?