Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been

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Research done at the BMJ itself indicates that having the value of a paper judged by the editor, or at least a small group of editorial staff, would be likely to produce just as good results, while obviously being much quicker, much less expensive, completely transparent, less open to malpractice, no more prone to bias, and no longer wasteful of

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