The rise and fall of peer review
Wow. Pretty clear this paper was not peer reviewed.  Many of the arguments would not get past a high school English teacher.  ‘A whole lot of money for nothin’ perhaps, but that money is not spent on peer review. Peer review doesn’t improve research productivity …. This reminds me of the argument that we should not spend more money on education, because education budgets have gone up, but test scores have not. The argument implies (but does not state, because of the absurdity), that spending less money would raise scores.  And, remarkably (&#x2F;s), peer review does not guarantee that all scientific results are reproducible and correct.<p>As the author points out, no one has done the control. We don’t know how much worse the scientific literature would be without peer review, and we don’t no how many important insights are lost because of poor reviews.  But as someone who has done a lot of peer review (and has had papers rejected with uninformed reviews), it is difficult to state how much worse things could be. (But perhaps that is an overstatement, as very few papers do not find their way into some journal).<p>The scientific literature today is overwhelming. Peer review helps make it less so.