One of the best essays that I have read about current science.
Ricky Lanusse. How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion. https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/how-peer-review-became-sciences-most-dangerous-illusion-54cf13da517c
Peer review is far from a firewall. In most cases, it’s just a paper trail that may have even encouraged bad research. The system we’ve trusted to verify scientific truth is fundamentally unreliable — a lie detector that’s been lying to us all along.
Let’s be bold for a minute: If peer review worked, scientists would act like it mattered. They don’t. When a paper gets rejected, most researchers don’t tear it apart, revise it, rethink it. They just repackage and resubmit — often word-for-word — to another journal. Same lottery ticket in a different draw mindset. Peer review is science roulette.
Once the papers are in, the reviews disappear. Some journals publish them. Most shred them. No one knows what the reviewer said. No one cares. If peer review were actually a quality check, we’d treat those comments like gospel. That’s what I value about RealClimate [PubPeer, my addition]: it provides insights we don’t get to see in formal reviews. Their blog posts and discussions — none of which have been published behind paywalls in journals — often carry more weight than peer-reviewed science.