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My field is more Education than CS or engineering, but I don't think publishers add value as much as, simply create a convenient baseline for readers to judge the quality of the work. Classrooms, all through grade school to College voraciously decry sources like wikipedia or... well any free media as possibly bad sourcing. With that sort of ingrained mindset, it's really no wonder why publishers still exist (and probably will continue to exist) even with the recent advances in open source.

I know from my experience though, that many in academia would not publish papers without a journal because their contracts with the university either forbid such action or part of their contract explicit state they MUST be published by a respected publisher.




>Classrooms, all through grade school to College voraciously decry sources like wikipedia or... well any free media as possibly bad sourcing.

The problem isn't that Wikipedia is free. The problem is that Wikipedia is, by definition, a secondary(where it links to a primary source) or tertiary source(where it links to another link that links to the primary source). If you're doing the proper research, you should be using primary sources as much as possible. That means you should be directly citing the paper that Wikipedia is using, not Wikipedia itself.




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