The academic community gatekeeps to ensure members of the community are not stealing from each other or are otherwise committing unethical acts.
There are typically processes to ensure rigor in the findings and to weed out crap.
It doesn't always work, but it tends to work much better than any other community
There might be a paradox here. We need closed communities to weed out slop. But we need open communities to weed out corruption.
We need (and have) clopen communities. (Or, as a biologist might say, semi-permeable)