Is scientific peer-review a failed experiment? This essay (from a psychologist) makes the case for ditching pre-publication peer review. There do seem to be a lot of parallels between the arguments for pre-publication peer review and the argument for suppressing online misinformation (and the related issue of censorship). Maybe if we can solve the problem for science, we can solve it more generally.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review/comment/11127579
@DecaturNature
I can't open the link, but fwiw peer review still mostly works outside medicine.
In medicine the enormous amounts of money and the pressure on every Chinese doctor to publish results in an unmanageable corrupt avalanche of junk science.
That said, most "peer review needs to be destroyed" articles I've seen boil down to the author being upset that his Very Important Study didn't get accepted for publication in a sufficiently high-impact journal like Nature, Science, or Lancet.
@Je5usaurus_rex
When I've discussed preprints in an inter-disciplinary group, the biologists were the least comfortable with abandoning peer-reviewed journals (relative to astronomers, for example) specifically because there are so many manuscripts and so many researchers that they want some system for filtering out the junk.
The arguments in the article don't depend on there being Chinese hordes or an elitist Nature-Science-Cell cabal.
Here's the correct link (other link was to a comment): https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
@DecaturNature
3. The fundamental argument seems to be a concern that peer review stops disruptive ideas. Truth is, all high impact journals _prioritize_ controversial papers, and reject papers supporting status quo. Their life blood is controversy and disruption, because that generates citations.
Science funding is also mainly given to large groups using novel technology. The quirky lone researcher is SOL, but highly funded science teams producing disruption is the name of the game.
@DecaturNature
1. It doesn't catch all errors or fraud. It does however catch a lot, especially plagiarism. There is survivor bias here, no one sees the errors and incomprehensible English of the rejected papers (well, tbh they tend to show up in predatory journals).
2. It makes articles unfun. This is a target audience issue - is the target the media and general public wanting to be entertained, or other scientists who just want to know what the results were and how you got them?