For me, trustworthiness. Not all journals are equal but some are held in such high esteem that I would grant a lot more credence to the findings of an article published in a journal than one self-published.
I have neither the time or will to assess the merits of each individual who might publish something. If a name is sufficiently big within a field, it's usually in a sufficiently big journal; on the other hand, I would treat a self-published article with the same level of skepticism as those low-tier journals that happily publish pseudoscience as fact.
Call it snobbishness if you will, and I'm fully aware that academia is full of it, but that's the role that a journal fills for me.
If it's good research, it's more likely to be published in an academic venue (and possibly the other way around). So if there are a lot of papers, I will prefer the academically published ones.
I have limited time to read publications, I am not going to read everything just because it is available somewhere. For me, the amount of papers published these days is an argument for academic venues, not against them.
(As I am a computer scientist I have a hard time writing "journals" instead of any more general term, as conferences are way too popular in this field.)
One cool thing about "unsurprising" results—trustworthiness of the source doesn't mean much more than fitting your preconceptions in any way that reviewers can tease out anyway.
If a self-published article included full equipment and software to replicate their results in a multimedia fashion (basically included engineering), would that alter your snob-ness?
For me, trustworthiness. Not all journals are equal but some are held in such high esteem that I would grant a lot more credence to the findings of an article published in a journal than one self-published.
I have neither the time or will to assess the merits of each individual who might publish something. If a name is sufficiently big within a field, it's usually in a sufficiently big journal; on the other hand, I would treat a self-published article with the same level of skepticism as those low-tier journals that happily publish pseudoscience as fact.
Call it snobbishness if you will, and I'm fully aware that academia is full of it, but that's the role that a journal fills for me.