This is not surprising of course. What has changed probably is that science over the past 20 years has become more "social", but not in a good way. Since there are so many good scientists everywhere, people get ahead by using any means to make their science more public, mostly through conferences, organizing conferences, pursuing various committees and subcommittees, befriending journal editors, the press, and of course social media plays a part in this, but not alone. Antisocial people will have a hard time.
Where to start here? What do we want the purpose of publishing and peer review to be? Out of all this publicity dance, which part gets distilled into the solid foundation of science? I do think this whole journals/publishing/conference/apply-for-funding thingy is a bit too ancient and incremental, and more radical solutions would be nice to try. I think fundamental to this is the structure of funding, do we really want small funds going to individual small PIs, or maybe more independence, or less independence ...
Where to start here? What do we want the purpose of publishing and peer review to be? Out of all this publicity dance, which part gets distilled into the solid foundation of science? I do think this whole journals/publishing/conference/apply-for-funding thingy is a bit too ancient and incremental, and more radical solutions would be nice to try. I think fundamental to this is the structure of funding, do we really want small funds going to individual small PIs, or maybe more independence, or less independence ...