Right now we have research that is slow to publish, but publishing is careful, and once published we treat is as a kind of truth. You can call it a "Brittanica" approach.
Alternative is not just a faster publishing, but more feedback, and better discussion around the subject. You could call it a "Wikipedia" approach.
In the "Wikipedia" approach, you don't rely on the publisher's prestige, nor citations, as a meter of trustworthiness. Before accepting the results you review it's discussions and critique.
A similar switch happened with traditional news publishing. Years ago you had to rely on the fact that an article was published in Economist, and vetted by their good editors. Nowadays, there is a lot of independent content, and there are communities (like HN, or Reddit's AskScience), and non-profits (fact checkers, or Snopes) that point out the potential issues.
I don't think using the decentralization of news as a comparison is a good one. I agree that there are great things about new media outlets, but on the balance we are arguably worse off -- news is more polarized and political than ever. There's more great analysis and commentary online, but there's also more analysis and commentary in general.
Alternative is not just a faster publishing, but more feedback, and better discussion around the subject. You could call it a "Wikipedia" approach.
In the "Wikipedia" approach, you don't rely on the publisher's prestige, nor citations, as a meter of trustworthiness. Before accepting the results you review it's discussions and critique.
A similar switch happened with traditional news publishing. Years ago you had to rely on the fact that an article was published in Economist, and vetted by their good editors. Nowadays, there is a lot of independent content, and there are communities (like HN, or Reddit's AskScience), and non-profits (fact checkers, or Snopes) that point out the potential issues.