Surely peer-review should have picked up the Surgisphere fraud? You think? The same article quoted Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet, where the Surgisphere papers were published. He had this to say in his defence:

‘... the peer review process is not designed to capture research misconduct.’

To be honest I don’t feel this is the most... See more

Whether we like it or not, research is already, easily and increasingly, published outside of journals, and so are reviews. Reforming peer review, therefore, should mean working with the way science is shared in public, not ignoring it.

There seems to be an open debate on whether the current system of peer-review actually weeds out papers correctly. This experiment re-submitted 12 already approved papers and 89% of the peer reviewers said the paper shouldn’t be published. More recently hundreds of sham papers managed to get through the process as scammers posed as guest editors.

The system of peer-review and publishing has worked for a long time when we were actually dependent on them for things like physical distribution of magazines, manuscripts, etc. Today, journals use the industry's reliance on peer-reviewed publications as a proxy for quality in order to coordinate a lot of unpaid labor. Authors are somewhat... See more

The paper you just read could never be published in a scientific journal. The studies themselves are just as good as the ones Ethan and I have published in fancyjournals, but writing about science this way is verboten.

For instance, in a journal you’re not allowed to say things like “we don’t know why this happens.” You’re not allowed to admit that... See more