An Essay I wrote for GRF competition entitled ``Holographic Quantum Gravity and Horizon Instability" [2304.01292], received an ``honourable mention". What is strange, is that I was invited to publish with a particular (quite well-reputed) journal, on the condition that I shorten it down to two pages. I agree that my Essay was very tersely written and awkwardly close to Engelhardt and Horowtz's paper on the No Transmission Principle (I am planning on revising it by about September with some further aspects; initially, the paper was supposed to contain some more mathematics on SCC and include NTP, but was asked to first shorten to less than 10 pages), but on the basis of publications it seemed a little strange that two pages was the condition put on a paper elaborating a substantial work (a revised version is what was submitted, rather than the arXived version which is not the current version). In fact, I was told by a colleague that the initial and final (arXived) versions of the essay had some differences, making it look as if the point of the paper was more or less to superficially include the NTP paper. Maybe this condition was to let more papers on the GRF edition be added, but I am now forced to doubt the quality of papers being published under such conditions.
One of the reasons I read journals (mostly either JHEP or PRD) is to make sure that calculations in a particular paper I read on arXiv are correct when I cannot hand-check them. But if there are chances that papers are forced to shorten or so, it would definitely affect quality and brush aside details that may be negligible for someone but subtly significant for someone else. Not to mention open access in general is something of a worry; to read a paper, one requires either an institutional subscription to the journal, or is hidden behind a paywall. Such things in the academia seem a little bothersome, especially for people who are in early career works who do not have grants/funding. It is for these reasons that arXiv is a very commendable effort, considering that they do not have any processing charges and is fully open access, as opposed to journals that have open access only if the submitting author pays a charge (for myself, the SCOAP initiative is a good effort alongside arXiv in the field of hep-th that helps in preventing out-of-pocket money from being used). Publishers like Springer and APS should have options so that authors from any field have an option for free publication. I understand their necessity due to on-paper publication, but at least for those who do not have any grants or opt in for solely online publication, such an option should be available. And as of the conditional publications during peer-review or desk editor requirements, these interfere directly with the content of a work, and this is something that should be taken more seriously.