It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup … A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a ‘bizarre’ ‘triplepay’ system, in which ‘the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product’.
