“Do more for less!” Plus of course “Make things more complicated but easier!”

Or pay for some service to do most of it (and increase APC/subscription prices accordingly), then as you note, a human must make the call, adding even more cost. Note that all of this is desired/required by the research community who at the same time are complaining about high prices.

Also really interested in Signals as another group developing a broad array of, well, signals research-signals.com

I tend to think of some of the approaches used in other industries such as banking. A bank won't give you a loan unless they're pretty sure you are who you say you are. Infolinx is one group doing this infolinx.ai

This answer gets complicated and circular once one realizes that funding decisions are often made by academics doing peer review of grant applications. To quote Pogo, "we have met the enemy and they are us."

Although perhaps the better answer is that academia follows what the funders do (follow the money always works as an answer). If money is given out based on papers, then that's what matters as many institutions are now financial firms with a sideline in education and research

All good questions. To me, the answer is that academia has largely outsourced its researcher assessment process. It is a difficult and time consuming process and in many cases, must rely on proxies (if I get 4,000 applications for a job, I can't do a deep dive into every applicant).

And there's also the tricky issue of endogeny. Is having the same small group of authors/reviewers/readers a sign of fraud or a sign of a new emerging field? scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/14/g...

I worked in a spermatogenesis lab that made a mouse mutant with an unexpected enteric nervous system issue. Would not being known in that field have prevented others from taking our work seriously?

...care needs to be taken not to exclude someone simply because you don't know who they are. This would prevent any new entrants into a field and enforce the old boys club. Lots of potentially great research to be done by those with less funding or in areas where attending a meeting is prohibitive.

I think it was the word "known" that triggered my response. There's a lot of good work being done to develop tools around identity -- is this person who they say they are, are they connected to the field they're writing in, or to other institutions/authors. Which is good for raising flags, but...

Does that mean that really good work by someone without the “right” pedigree is cast aside?

Everyone teaching right now sees lots of evidence for this. Students using LLMs are, to varying degrees, incapable of independently doing the things they are supposedly learning, the same way that students copying answers from a solutions manual then struggle to do something similar on an exam.