Peer Evil – the rotten business model of modern science

Why has nobody mentioned Climategate? The fact that the ‘Team’ plotted to get rid of a journal editor … QED. The fact that they managed to cow an editor into issuing a written apology … QED.

The medical sciences have faced this problem for a long time. Business interests from big Pharma bias peer review and paper submissions to favour their drug treatments.
The solution has been meta-analysis of the literature by independent research bodies like the Cochrane institute.
This is similar to the IPCC.
Some branches of medical research have also adopted an open, transparent peer review system. Some of the neurobiology journals I think publish the reviewers names, their comments and the authors responses along with the paper online so that the whole process is completely open.
The idea that abandoning expert assessment of research before it is published will eliminate bias seems ridiculous, and there are certainly no real world examples of this ever working. The sort of nonsense that gets published in journals with no or very lax review standards tends to get them a reputation, such as the ‘dog astrology’ journal! Those familiar with the literature will know which we mean.
I would expect that the writer of this essay would not have advocated abandoning some form of peer review when faced with the serious level of bias and distortion prevalent in clinical research and drug testing as a means of getting better medical science. But perhaps the inanity of the suggestion is a result of not being aware of how other fields of research have approached the problem of independent, open and unbiased peer review.

Actually, when it comes right down to the beginnings, the Internet was designed for that purpose (peer review). And today we have it. But the disdain and contempt the ‘establishment’ has for the reviews from the Internet is evident (in the recent submission of Dr. Tol alone).
But that it is not liked, reviled, and generally spat upon by the establishment does not detract from its effectiveness, nor its utilitarianism. A paper is reviewed in days (at worst weeks). Grammar is not the cause of rejection, flaws in both method and results are. And they are discovered. Why? Because there is not a concern about protecting ones turf, but rather in using the research to further knowledge. The reviewers are not paid. They get no credit for finding the flaws. What they do get is another piece to a puzzle which they are seeking to fit together.
Perhaps the answer has been right under our noses for the past 40 years. We have seen papers shredded – justifiably so – by Internet reviewers. None anonymous. These were not petulant criticisms, but detailed analysis of flaws with the papers themselves. Sometimes the problems were minor in which case the author can then rewrite the paper with corrections. other times, they were major enough to warrant (and sometimes with success) the withdrawal of the papers.
The Peer review process as is is a hindrance to science. The peer review process as it could be might bring us back to another golden age of discovery.

Blame the bean counters.
Consider a bean counter working at a university employing a bunch of scientists doing research. The bean counter worries that these very expensive and highly skilled people (some of them get paid more than the bean counter) might be wasting the budget and not working hard. But the bean counter doesn’t really have a clue what these guys do. In the back of his mind he is utterly convinced that some of them are lazy and should be sacked. But frustratingly he can’t tell which ones.
Promotion time comes around and a lot of the scientists apply for promotion. The bean counter can’t tell which of them are doing the mysterious things they do well enough to be promoted. What to do? From the bean counter’s point of view it is a mess!
Ergo peer review – the bean counter’s friend. It gives a way of keeping score – a concrete output which even a bean counter can understand and feel comfortable with because of course it is something that can be counted. The bean counter now thinks he understands what is going on in this strange world of science. It is all about producing these peer reviewed paper thingies. Scientists with lots of papers are good. Those with few are bad. What was hard is suddenly made simple.
It is a touch more complicated than this; some journals are regarded as better than others; some papers are cited more than others. But this is the kind of problem the bean counter feels very comfortable with. He is very happy constructing all sorts of weighted schemes for adding up the numbers of the papers and the citation rates and the qualities of the journals and thus comparing one scientist numerically against another. He now feels fully empowered to pass judgement on scientists – sacking some – promoting others – despite the fact that he still doesn’t have the slightest clue what it is they do.
And being a fully modern manager he of course also feels obliged to crack the whip and increase productivity. Those damned lazy scientists must work harder! We want MORE papers in BETTER journals. More, more, more! A bonus for Phil who published the most. Jones didn’t publish? Sack the lazy sod – he is letting the side down.
Scientists of course know this is a load of crock. The production of papers is not the real output of science. Putting too much emphasis on this distorts the way in which science is done. It drives people away from the controversial – the difficult – the fundamental – the important – into working in peculiar little niches where results are easy to come by and papers can be churned out by the score. Most scientists are aware that the system has serious problems. Wed rather spend more of our time thinking about the science and less of it fussing around with papers and journals and peer review. But the bean counters have control of the money and insist on these rules. If you don’t play their game you are likely to have trouble feeding your kids.
Things are slowly changing. There are much better ways of publishing work today. A paper can go up on the preprint server and be commented on and revised in real time. It is quick and accurate. Good work is recognised. Bad work is obliviated. Scientists don’t need to publish papers to exchange ideas and talk to each other. We have telephones. We have skype. We can hop on a plane and go visit someone. But the sticking point is always the people with the money – the bean counters. They are just extremely reluctant to give up their measuring stick. And those high up in the academic world are the ones who have been most successful at pumping out peer reviewed papers. They may not see an urgent need for change.

jc says:
June 25, 2013 at 5:04 am
“Is there corruption in the most elemental sense – of something rotten – in acceptance that it is legitimate to refuse to acknowledge a basic reality, with the claim that this is part of discourse and healthy contention?
This is an issue that goes beyond the degradation of “climate science”. It goes beyond any science. It is a requirement for any human interaction, with others or with physical realities.”
Human interactions depend on trust. Trust becomes impossible in a society under the control of a secret police.
Hope that answers your question.

DNA, physiology, cell biology. Science today is moving faster than ever before. It just seems like the old discoveries matter more because the new ones haven’t been exploited in technology to their fullest extent yet.

Mr Guest Blogger,
You certainly got the period right 1895 to 1945 was a period of practical science that gave us our modern world. The advances since have been small advances on old themes. Practical things have advanced, the theoretical not so much, a wrong turn around a century ago has seen science mired in imaginary particles, imaginary dark energy and dark matter, to save their imaginary science. Thus new ideas are pilloried to save their precious theories. Ric Werme Oddly the first use of a cellular type phone was used in WW2 used by the secret service from aircraft contacting resistance fighters on the ground in occupied France. Not a lot new under the sun. Science has been going backwards, it is the practical experimenters that have given us the modern world.

@ DirkH says:
June 25, 2013 at 5:32 am
“Human interactions depend on trust. Trust becomes impossible in a society under the control of a secret police.”
———————————————————————————————————————–
Trust requires belief. Belief requires confidence that what is seen is true. When presented by another person, confidence in what is true depends on confidence that the person presenting it firstly knows what is true and secondly will present it honestly.
In a situation, a group, a sect, a culture, a world, that does not allow others to be in a position to evaluate the capacity for knowledge and the commitment to honestly, there can be no human trust. There can only be an imitation of it showing itself in acceptance buttressed by necessity, desire generated by powerlessness or need for identification, and hope.
Policing comes in many forms and its activity does not have to be secret in any one action, but can be in effect secret in that its claims to legitimate existence are not themselves properly seen or even conciously understood by the proponents. Where there is this effective secrecy there will always be an abuse and betrayal of trust.
Whatever opinions might be proffered about policing of anything else, science, more so than anything else, has as its first demand that truth or otherwise be seen and that secrecy is anathema. If there is to be any reference or judgement about the role of societal and cultural norms, and the requirement for honesty and openness in these, then science must – not in its activities, but in its expression of these values – exist as it should.
Science cannot and should not assume the role of dictating societal structures and expectations. A significant part of the very degradation that can be seen now comes from the attempted utilization of science for legitimizing things beyond its ambit, built easily on the hubris and ignorance of some of those practicing as scientists themselves.
But science, having a distinctive role in the application of these principles, with a discipline demanded of it that, to a degree not present in other areas, should exclude those people and propositions that fail in this, cannot exist in a more general degradation, and conversely by being what it should be, can form a major part, by way of a cultural and personal imperative, in how societies exist more generally.
And it is true that secret policing whatever form that takes, as a nominal scientific adjudication, or as a general suppression of human capacity for confidence in the ability to make judgements and therefore trust is incompatible with human potential and therefore the ability to exist.
The result has always been and always will be decay, and not least for those who support and participate in this. Any group of people, or society, subject to this has a future of increasing barbarism. It is capitulation to the primaeval.

richard verney says:
June 25, 2013 at 2:14 am
I would say that it is not only science that appears to have stalled in the mid 20th century.
Is there really any truly great art post the art deco period?….
Has the world become too cynical, are there no true romantics? I do not know the answer, but there appears to be a greater number of people of average talent and ability, and far fewer truly exceptional geniuses amongst us.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
E.M. Smith covered just this question at isms, ocracies and ologies In short the entire philosophy has changed since The Enlightenment gave us the Scientific Method as a way of thinking and the US Constitution.

What matters most to me is just “What is this ‘Enlightenment’ and what does it have to do with the USA?” It was, at it’s core, a movement away from a world driven by a Religious Authority and away from a world driven by a Civil Central Authority (be they Kings or Emperors) and toward a world of free individuals thinking for themselves.

What we have now is a swing back to using ‘Feelings’ instead of reason which allows ‘Practical Politics’ to use propaganda to control people. SEE: Dumbing Down America by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld for how John Dewey’s Progressive school system was used to create unthinking individuals. Robin goes into greater detail at Invisible Serfs Collar
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ~ H. L. Mencken
Those in control feel threatened by genius and normally will do anything to control and kill it. So now Gifted children and adults are at high risk for being identified as ADD. and being ‘Medicated’ at ages as young as 6 years via government schools.
SIDE EFFECTS

Long-Term Effects of Ritalin: Changes in Brain Development
Ongoing research shows early-life use of Ritalin (methylphenidate) has complex effects that endure later into life. A study published in Biological Psychiatry suggests that exposure of Ritalin in youth may later disrupt development of brain cells in the hippocampus, region of the brain critical to memory, spatial navigation, and behaviorial inhibition. Damage can lead to memory problems, disorientation and depression in adulthood.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus is one of the first areas of the brain to suffer damage; memory problems and disorientation appear among the first symptoms.

EM Smith goes on to discuss the “Counter-Enlightenment” This is what we are currently seeing effects of in our current crop of ‘Scientists’ using Post-Modern Science instead of the scientific method.

That reference to “Romanticism” and the “Counter-Enlightenment” matters; and rather a lot. We will see that from those roots grows most of the current conflict between “Progressive” and “Socialist” movements and the Traditional American Enlightenment. Not directly, and not with a pure note, but with a strong current all the same.
One sidebar: While the Enlightenment tried to curtail the power of Kings and The Church, it was NOT an anti-religious movement. In the USA we see this clearly in the fairly strong presence of religion in The Founders. Congress opened with a prayer. So too the Courts. It was a later twist that turned the “Age of Reason” into “Humanism” and away from religion altogether. That thread reaches back through Renaissance Humanism and eventually ends in something called Secular Humanism. When someone speaks of the “Separation of Church and State” meaning no official state religion (but religion in the Public Square is OK), that is a Renaissance Humanist, headed into the Enlightenment ideals. When they say it instead means “Ban God from school and the public square”, they have moved into Secular Humanism….

To put it bluntly Abzats has identified a symptom of a much wider problem.

DirkH said: MattN says:
“June 25, 2013 at 5:09 am
“What exactly will banning peer review achieve? Every whacko theory will get published and no one will have any idea what’s legitimate or not. ”
Totally unlike today…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter”
Did you read my whole post? 3rd sentence that you didn’t include says exactly: “Not that I’m saying the current system does a stellar job of that now.”

I disagree with the author that peer review is always anonymous. I tell people who I am after I’ve reviewed their manuscript (the journal sometimes gives you the option of doing this). And as other commenters have said, not all scientific fields are alike. Focus on the problem “children”, as it were, and let the relatively well-behaved kids continue on uninterrupted.

The alternative to peer review is independent confirmation / replication of results. There is no reason why any hypotheses should be squelched from publication. The wheat is separated from the chaff by waiting to see if subsequently another independent scientist can confirm or replicate the results / predictions. This may take the form of running an experiment to confirm (or deny) a theoretical hypothesis, re-running a complex experiment to verify that the results are repeatable, or independently analyzing a given dataset to see if the conclusions drawn from such are robust. This is how the scientific method works. Peer review is worthless — its just opinion vs. opinion.

I am not convinced that the current peer review process is the problem. In many areas of science and particularly in the new field of climate science governments all around the world have thrown huge wads of cash towards climate research. With huge sums of money and research geared towards finding problems affecting the climate then by god problems can and will be found. It can’t really be described as corruption in a narrow sense, because researchers are merely following the direction they have been given by government.

Henry Bauer’s name was mentioned briefly above, but I think that his arguments deserve a wider audience, especially amongst the commentators here who are assuming that climate ‘science’ is a unique case of rogue science, and everything else is tickety-boo.
A few people added medical science to the list of rogue sciences, not enough I’m afraid.
Bauer’s argument is that the entire social set-up of science, too many people chasing too few grants and not enough prestige to go round, has thoroughly corrupted the whole scientific process from top to bottom in every field. Peer review is just one subset of what is going wrong, the dirty tricks that researchers use to gain and keep status apply to every field in every possible way. He cites examples from medicine, geology, cosmology, physics, and I would happily add psychology to the list.

Thanks, Abzats. Very interesting article.
Science publishing should be open, let the whole community be the judges, in a free-market style.
Anonymous, unpaid reviewers take too long and can easily be corrupted.
Transparency is the key. Free, public publishing in the Web is a likely way out of this problem that is at its worst in climate science.

There is one enforcement of reality, of true science: when results must be right due to direct ties to applied science, to engineering working in the real world.
But that applies to some fields far less than others, like in climatology having a model with repeated wrong predictions is no problem to those involved.
“The second red flag is that none of them gets paid. Those who believe in Santa Claus will say, well, they are just nice people volunteering their time to help advance science. Those who work for a living will smell a rat. I can give you one reason: being a reviewer gives you power over other people.”
Doing work without pay is also an aspect of the highest-postcount members on various web forums and the dominant deletionists on wikipedia controversial articles. Many of the former, on anything from politics to computer games, tend to be on average the most ideologically motivated, groupthink-enforcing, ego-driven in the worst way, and dishonest subset of the population I’ve ever seen, utterly into bashing the writing of those they dislike for reasons which have jack to do with pursuit of objective truth…
If anything, the only surprise is that science hasn’t been harmed worse by the present peer review system’s design, which must be credited to the better nature of many scientists, though not everyone who calls himself or herself a scientist deserves the term.
“It was introduced a long time ago, but it took over the scientific community at about mid 20th century. Why is it important? Every scientist must publish his or her work. If you do not publish, you will not advance your career.”
Aside from other problems, it encourages the scientific equivalent of patent spam.
Anyway, the present system is indeed broken. Reviewers should be non-anonymous and paid, among other changes (such as those Zalotocky suggested).

I’m sorry but I disagree.
I do agree that peer review as it stands is shockingly weak as a standard of scientific excellence and has been corrupted beyond recognition in several disciplines.
It’s like democracy; the worst form of government imaginable, and yet better than anything else that’s been tried.
Overhaul is clearly in order; no publication without full disclosure of all data and methodology. ‘Proprietary data’ claims should result academic dismissal.
Also; no more unpaid and anonymous peer-review. Paid reviews published alongside the final work. You want to get rid of the stink; sunshine is the best disinfectant. The pay will assure that people are willing to do the work. There are always hungry newly minted PHd’s out there willing to actually do the groundwork necessary to ensure a competent review. But they aren’t too interested in doing it for free.
Finally; if you want to be a peer reviewed journal; fully disclosed board, including their involvement with academic and private institutions and no-pay wall. Period. Universities can and will pay the subscription price, regardless of on-line availability, and availability of the paper, its data, and methodology should be freely available to any who wish to check the math. Otherwise you are the great and powerful Oz, standing over there behind the curtain.
As far as the board members themselves; the first time they publicly advocate a political position or policy that relates to their field; they should be cut off from all government funding. If they are a professor at a public institution; gone. It is okay for a scientist to campaign, but not on the public dime. Go to a private institution if that is what you want to do. It isn’t a question of academic freedom, it’s about using government (tax) money to campaign. If you want to use your government paid position as a bully pulpit; you need to first get yourself elected to office.
That isn’t to say they shouldn’t be allowed to write a letter to their representative if they feel so inclined. But to testify in front of congress is an overtly political act. Congress doesn’t do science. To engage in the kind of rhetoric and outright obfuscation as some of these people have amounts to official misconduct. Government funded ‘proprietary’ research? The mere claim demands a criminal sentence of jail time.
Of course, given the recent levels of official misconduct currently being ignored or excused; my final observation is the real solution to all of this is to get the government out of ‘soft science’.
If the Army needs a new laser or the Navy wants a new propulsion system; go for it. If non-deterministic models of massive chaotic systems who’s inputs are not well understood are the topic; forget it. The government has no place in paying people engage in either tasseography or haruspicy. Such is the state of modern climate ‘science’.
We need to learn to distinguish between real science and the use of complex statistical models to forecast the behavior of massive chaotic systems whose inputs are complex to the point that even they cannot be reliably modeled. That is shamanism, not science. (Picture Mike Mann in a full zulu-mask dancing around a bunch of bristle-cone pine cores while grad students holding fluorescent light bulbs recite an al-gorian chant.) If you think about it; the reading of entrails and tea leaves to predict the future is a really good analogy for the ‘science’ of GCM’s.
Anyway; back to my original point; you have to name some better form of review, you cannot simply suggest we do away with the current method of scientific refinement without suggesting an alternative means. Otherwise you have cast us back into the dark ages with no mechanism by which we can agree to improve our scientific understanding.

In Re; Austin6/25, 6:22 am;
Austin, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I got my bachelors in business, with an ’emphasis’ on finance. Yes, it is a similar problem. What the good professor most likely realized is that, once you’ve done massive regressions on whole industries, all you’ve really accomplished is forecast one of your major inputs; economic growth and development. It is circular reasoning. If you knew the answer (how much economic growth will occur in the next quarter, ceterus peribus), you could probably have a model predict fairly accurately how any particular industry would do over that period of time. Less so on a particular stock, but still; once you agregate all the stocks in an industry, and correlate all the industries; you have modeled the economy. Economic growth is simply the aggregation of how each economic productivity unit performed.
Except for one problem; your model assumes a whole bunch of relevant inputs that are simply not known; the economic implications of elections and legislation, the impact of regional weather on agricultural output and construction productivity. Demographic patterns, fed monetary policy and paradigm shifts in technology all play into it. It is simply not possible to model these things with any degree of accuracy.
So you are left with the circular reasoning of the CAPM model and the weak form efficient market hypothesis. No matter how large your data set, there is simply no place in CAPM for Fannie May’s ‘liar’ loans, Obamacare, google glasse, or hurricane Sandy.

I cannot agree with the author’s statement that “these problems have been solved in all other spheres.”
I’ve been earning my living as a professional translator for more than 30 years. In translation business, some agencies (middlemen who find translators for corporate clients) are using anonymous “reviewers” to evaluate translations. The problem here is the same as in the scientific peer review process. American translation agency owners, as well as their employees that coordinate translations, usually don’t know any language but English. “Reviewers” are often competitors who cannot find work, because their translations are of lower quality that those they review. You can imagine the consequences.
Personal vendettas are also abound. I’ve been working with a certain editor for more than 20 years. He is an intelligent person but cannot write very well. For this reason, he has been taking editing work instead of translation work. (Editing pays much less than translation but gives one a power to tell the client if this or that translator is good or bad. Strange, illogical, counterproductive situation, but that’s how it is.) In the past, I never had bad reviews from this editor. As years went by, we have become closely acquainted. Recently, while talking to him on the phone, we had a sharp disagreement about a personal matter that had nothing to do with our translation work. Et voila! I suddenly stopped getting work from an important client who uses him as a translation reviewer, despite the fact that this client and this reviewer were happy with my translations for many years.
I think this situation is very similar to the evil peer review situation in science. I am sure it exists in other professional fields as well.

I find it amazing this WUWT allows this fundamentally flawed essay on its sight. This entire essay is what I like to call, “young people have no respect these days”. Right from the first sentence “1895-1945” was the “most exciting period,” Really? No. What about the human genome project, dark energy, dark matter, cellular biology and how cells die, exoplanets, lasers, cloning, and I could go on. There is no evidence that science has slowed down, it’s just moved to different areas, specifically the biological sciences and less astrophysics. There is no evidence science has slowed down at all.
Have we slowed down in “fundamental” sciences well yes, because fundamental sciences are just that fundamental. The fundamental sciences like Atomic Theory, Chemical Theory, and micro biology all happened long before the early twentieth century, and people like Einstein and Bohr built off Faraday and Maxwell before them, just as Hawking built off his predecessors in the 1980’s and 90’s. Science is science it moves along, it is your perspective that give you the impression you have. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries
The essay then goes on to explain how peer review process has slowed everything down, and yes it has slowed everything down that was the point. After the disasters of eugenics and Piltdown man, aether space the scientific community felt more scientific rigor was necessary, and justifiably so. Piltdown man went on for 40 years, and it was easily disprovable, science even without peer review, is slow.
The peer review process is fundamentally sound but it can be exploited when the pool of reviewers is too small, despite the anonymity of the reviewers, they still know each other. Very young sciences have this problem and pseudo sciences as well. Where things cannot be independently and conclusively tested are more difficult to overturn, because of the whole reliance on statistics and unrepeatable science.
The article goes on to talk about volunteerism and the “Santa Claus” notion that “they are just nice people volunteering their time to help advance science.” This is exceptionally cynical and completely false, I could site thousands of examples of volunteers helping in their respective fields, people do it on a daily basis, do some people have an agenda yes, can it be politicized sure, but volunteerism works great and has for thousands of years. I would cite examples but I wouldn’t even know where to start.
As for the review process, all authors feel their paper is “brilliant” the problem is most of them are not, and there is limited room in the journal, it’s this exclusivity that gives the paper its reputation, its ability to filter the non-science. You are all for throwing out the peer review system, but you give no alternative to this process, you have 100 papers, you can only publish 5, how do you decide? Everyone one knows what everyone is writing about generally you can tell whose paper is whose. Even if the papers are submitted anonymous, you can’t get perfect objectivity, how do you decide? Are you going to choose the reviewers(Bias)? Voting system? Who gets to vote(yet more bias)? In a world of limited resources, who gets in the journal? You can’t publish it all.
Or do we go Wikipedia route, any nut bar living in his basement can now become a reviewer, it was suppose to be unbiased in the end it quickly became extremely biased and politicized.
Paid editors? Who hires them? What is their expertise? What are their biases? Journal boards have lazy friends too, bringing money into the situation only brings in more politics not less.
“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” – Churchill
Peer review is like democracy, it’s bad but everything else we tried is worse and with limited resources someone has to decide, who should it be?

You all have a computer sitting in front of you. Imagine you could somehow take it back in time and show it to the very best scientists you could find from the first half of the 20th century.
You could not even explain what it was for, let alone how it worked.
That alone should alone should be sufficient to put to rest the idea that science has stagnated.
As for improvements to the peer review process, double-blind reviewing could be tried and might be a slight improvement, but it would not have a major effect for the simple reason that it is easy to guess who the authors of a paper are – I have never seen a paper where the authors did not refer to their own, previous, work!

DirkH says:
June 25, 2013 at 1:19 am
phlogiston says:
June 25, 2013 at 1:04 am
“- Look also at the model of a journal like Nature which has full time salaried reviewers. These professional reviewers are not so subject to conflicts of interest like finding a competitor’s paper in front of them for review.”
Nature, the journal, is owned by Germans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Holtzbrinck_Publishing_Group
Maybe you want a green romanticist ideology to filter your science, maybe not.
I guess you’re right, salaried editors of a prestigious journal are kind of public figures and come under political pressure regarding AGW etc, so compared to peer review it may be out of the frying pan into the fire as regards impartiality, certainly in connection with climate.
BTW the company I work for has also been bought be German scientific equipment manufacturer so I guess I’ve also become an honorary German 🙂

The matter is more complex than presented. During many years as professional scientist, I found bias and incompetence in reviewing. (Conversely, sometimes reviewers miss gross errors, which are then published) The author has, however, a chance to fight back and prove error or bias in the review. I had to struggle most for the manuscripts I tought my best. One manuscript went through four pairs of reviewers; in the end, the Editor decided in my favor. Also, there are several journals in each field. Once, an editor rejected a manuscript judged publishable by both reviewers. I succeeded with the competition.
The problem is, however, the evaluation of research proposals. Research money.is given as grants, from government agencies and private foundations. At some time, private foundations began judging proposals first by ideology. The agencies get the proposals reviewed. There is no appeal, one can prove bias or idiocy in a review, it still stands. In adddition, affirmative action is applied (women and recognized minorities first), by design. I could propose a much better approach, but (1) this is not the place and (2) those who set up the process wouldn’t care to look at alternatives.

@DirkH
You’re preaching to the choir on all those points of science. But this article was still a rant. There are many possible rants against peer review. I have my own favorites. But a plan to reform/replace peer review would involve creating new metrics for defining success and failure, who lives as a scientist and who dies as a non-scientist. It would involve some way to know whether the plan succeeded or failed. This article was a rant, not a plan. This website is usually better than this, and so I objected.
@RogerKnights: review articles are extracted from papers that had testable hypotheses. They are more like a history. This article was nothing like a history of criticisms of peer review. It was a personal opinion with no ability to conceive that it might be wrong or misguided. For a something like a history of criticisms of peer review and science in general, read “Machiavelli’s Laboratory” by Berman. It’s online, free, and much better than this Abzats piece.

Eric Worrall says:
June 25, 2013 at 12:30 am
I don’t think its that simple. If there is no peer review, how can you prevent creationists and people with a perverse agenda, such as promoters of fake medical treatments, from flooding credible journals with junk science? I agree the current system is broken, but I don’t see how having no system is a viable replacement.
Eric: SIMPLE! Editors of Journals themselves can make that decision. By the way, why the “knee jerk” reaction on “creationists”? A slight bit of intellectual bigotry here? I used to receive a variety of “Journals” in my past engineering life..nothing having to do with the origin of life, or “creationism” would have ever appeared in such journals. Come to think of it, the writings on those matters are NOT SCIENCE to begin with, but rather SPECULATION. As an engineer, I tend towards REAL SCIENCE (i.e., experiement, repeat, confirm, move on…) So much else is SPECULATION disquised as “science”.

jimmi_the_dalek says:

You all have a computer sitting in front of you. Imagine you could somehow take it back in time and show it to the very best scientists you could find from the first half of the 20th century.
You could not even explain what it was for, let alone how it worked.

Actually, I could easily explain how it works, and assuming I’m talking with a group of intelligent scientists I’m pretty sure within 5 minutes I could have them up to speed on at least the concepts, if not the details required for them to recreate the technology.
As for what it’s for, who couldn’t understand the concept of arguing with strangers and looking at pictures of cats?

That alone should alone should be sufficient to put to rest the idea that science has stagnated.

Computer science is more about incremental improvements than groundbreaking science, and doesn’t really apply. Each person and project increases knowledge, and computer science doesn’t require fantastic theoretical proofs – either it works or it doesn’t.
I personally don’t think the concept of peer review is irredeemably broken, but I do believe there needs to be better controls. Big science is suffering from two major issues: huge money, and huge egos. Both tend to corrupt almost everything they contact.

Big Don says:
June 25, 2013 at 7:36 am
The alternative to peer review is independent confirmation / replication of results. There is no reason why any hypotheses should be squelched from publication….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Correct. If I recall correctly ~90 to 95% of the peer -reviewed papers are crap anyway and are disproved 5 to 10 years down the road.
How many papers have we seen here at WUWT that are less than worthless?
Do not forget Scott Armstrong’s recommendation to young scientists:

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, March 23, 1982.
Plain Prose: It’s Seldom Seen in Journals
Written by Dick Pothier
If you want to publish an article in some scientific or medical journal, here is some unusual advice from Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School: Choose an unimportant topic. Agree with existing beliefs. Use convoluted methods. Withhold some of your data. And write the whole thing in stilted, obtuse prose.
Armstrong, who is the editor of a new research publication called the Journal of Forecasting, offered the advice in a serious, scholarly article last month in the journal’s first issue. He said yesterday that he had studied the publication process in research journals for years.
“Although these rules clearly run counter to the goal of contributing to scientific knowledge — the professed goal of academic journals — they do increase a paper’s chance of being published,” Armstrong said.
“Some readers may feel that the suggestions here … are extreme,” he wrote in his article. “However, they provide a description of many papers published in the social sciences…. It is not by accident that intelligent and successful scientists produce such work.” Armstrong surveyed dozens of recent studies on how articles in such journals get published, and the result, he said, “was rather depressing, if our job is to get that research information out and have the readers benefit from it.”
In one study, Armstrong said, academics reading articles in scientific journals rated the authors’ competence higher when the writing was less intelligible than when it was clear.
In another study, Armstrong said, research papers were mailed to a sampling of dozens of researchers. Half the scientists received a paper that described an experiment confirming existing beliefs; the other half received a paper describing an identical experiment but with a different conclusion that challenged the consensus.
Although the methods used in the two sets of papers were identical, the scientists surveyed generally approved of the procedures used in the papers that confirmed existing beliefs and generally disapproved of the same methods when they were used to contradict what most scientists believed, Armstrong said.
“Papers with surprising results are especially important for adding significantly to what is known. Presumably, the editors of journals want to publish important papers,” Armstrong said. “On the other hand, they are concerned that the journal might look foolish — and so they reject many of the important papers.”
For young academics who wish to be published in such journals, Armstrong said, “the factors that would seem to be a deadly combination would be choosing an important problem and obtaining surprising results.”
Other studies, Armstrong said, indicate that obscure writing helps those who have little to say. And having little to say may also be an advantage, especially if the author withholds some significant data. “This will allow the researcher to continue publishing slightly different versions of the same research,” which Armstrong says is a common practice. Armstrong’s own specialty is the study of forecasting, and the new journal that published his how-to-publish article covers forecasting in many study areas, including economics, sociology, finance, psychology, and engineering…..

That was in 1982, I doubt that things have improved in the last twenty years.

Armchair sociology and anecdotes are inadequate arguments. Do some science, real science, and come back and report your findings.

Bob Kutz says: @ June 25, 2013 at 8:41 am
…..(Picture Mike Mann in a full zulu-mask dancing around a bunch of bristle-cone pine cores while grad students holding fluorescent light bulbs recite an al-gorian chant.) If you think about it; the reading of entrails and tea leaves to predict the future is a really good analogy for the ‘science’ of GCM’s…..
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Actually the reading of entrails was probably a bit more scientific. Entrails being animal innards.
This comment comes to mind when ever I hear that observation on entrails

George E. Smith says: @ July 22, 2010 at 9:36 am
…Marmots are great forecasters ! Back in the dark ages; round about the time when the Chinese invaded Mongolia; those northern nomadic tribes were great hunters and trappers; and traded in furs, including Marmots.
Once in a while; every few years or so, a Trapper would come back into town from his trap rounds; and tell the villagers that he had observed some Marmots up on a mountain that were all acting silly as if they were drunk on something.
At that news; the villagers would collect up all the recently collected pelts, in the town center, and burn the whole lot up; then they would burn the entire village to the ground; and move off into some adjacent valley, and start all over again.
Nobody knew why; it was just part of the tribal lore that they had learned from their ancestors; the Gods would be angry if they didn’t follow the ritual.
So when the Chinese invaded, and took over the place, and confiscated all the furs for themselves to send back to China; nobody thought to mention the ancient traditions that must be followed; and so when the Marmots started acting silly again; nobody dared to tell their Chinese masters, that they had to burn the town down.
The furs went back to China; along with the Bubonic Plague that the Marmots were the vector for; and those furs subsequently made it to Europe; and the great Plagues took off in Europe.
So Marmots are great predictors; if you know how to read them.
Every now and then the ground squirrels in the Kings Canyon National Park, all come down with Bubonic Plague and they have to close regions of the Park to campers. Plague needs a burrowing rodent like vector that hibernates through the winter; so the fleas that carry the virus don’t all die during the winter cold.

Given internal parasites like liver flukes, barber pole worms, hookworms, tape worms… can weaken, or in the case of barber pole worms and strongyles kill your prey animals or can infect humans, checking out the entrails could easily give a ‘Shaman’ clues as to the future health of his tribe or their prey animals. Therefore ‘the reading of entrails’ could be considered more scientific than GCMs in the hands of a knowledgeable shaman just as ‘the reading of marmots’ was.

buggs says:
June 25, 2013 at 12:37 pm
Long time lurker, first time poster.
I have to say this is probably one of the least reasonable articles I have come across ….
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That maybe true but it certainly got an interesting discussion going.

jimmi_the_dalek says:
June 25, 2013 at 4:13 pm
CodeTech @ 2.09
So you think you could explain how a computer worked in 5 mins to at scientist from say 1940?
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From The Computer History Museum

Charles Babbage (1791-1871), computer pioneer, designed the first automatic computing engines. He invented computers but failed to build them. The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in 2002, 153 years after it was designed….

It was the engineering that was the problem not the ‘Science’ Babbage then devoted time into improving the quality of machine tools. (As a computer illiterate why am I the one pointing this out?)

j_the_d, maybe you don’t understand enough of the history of computing and the internals of a modern computer.
As I said, I’m talking to intelligent people in 1940, right? So obviously they understand the concept of a switch, and a relay, then the electron valve (vacuum tube). Extend that to the transistor, which in a digital system operates as a switch. It’s pretty obvious that once you have that basic understanding the idea of printed circuits is simple, and improved technology making ICs doesn’t require a great leap of understanding. The idea of a machine state toggle every clock is pretty simple to grasp, what would be fascinating is their reaction to my explaining how we can do that a few billion times per second.
The concept of step programming has its origins in loom cards, Hollerith cards used in the census, and player pianos, I don’t really see how you think someone in 1940 wouldn’t understand the same concept being implemented in the computer instead of using physical cards. The way we’ve broken functions down into logical modules would make it simple to understand the separation between storage, processing, memory, display, etc, too.
Thing is, back in those days it was extremely improbable that these technologies, the beginnings of which were already in place, would ever become small and inexpensive enough for an individual to own. In the 80s I used to record in a million dollar recording studio, and it seemed pretty unlikely that I would be able to have equal or better quality equipment in my home for just a few thousand, but I do.
Storage, case construction, lasers, still not brain surgery, each has been an incremental improvement on earlier technology. For example, you can comprehend that at some point computers will be significantly faster and have what seems to us to be huge storage capability, but the details of the technology, and the applications that will be developed for them, are still a mystery to us today. If someone came back from 50 years in the future and showed you where technology has gone I doubt you’d be lost or incapable of understanding.
I’d be far more interested in their time travel system.

Gail
You miss the point completely. Read the whole thread. Many people have objected to the OP’s postulate that science has stagnated after 1945 and have given multiple examples of why this is wrong, from molecular biology to astrophysics. I pointed out that sitting in front of everyone who reads this thread is a device, a modern desktop computer, which relies on technologies whose basic principles were not even established in 1945 – it is not that they are evolutions of older technologies – they rely on things which were not even thought of, like transistors and lasers. Lasers are not an incremental improvement on earlier technology – they emerged in the 1950’s as a completely new invention.
Your attempt to describe a modern computer in terms of what was known in 1945 would end up falling foul of Arthur Clarke’s Law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
The point of my comments were not related to the history of computers as such, but were intended as another illustration that the had started from a ridiculous assertion, and gone on to inevitably reach a ridiculous conclusion.

I barely ever comment on blog posts but this… this… made me want to stand and applaud!
I have been telling my colleagues that we need to ban peer review for soooo long. It is a failed and ego-driven model. I feel like it is based on the fairytale impression you pointed out: “scientists are magical selfless beasts living to discover and uncover. They have the morals of angels and are never petty”.
I can tell you from experience that egos are the hallmark… that people pull rank all the time and we have to do the equivalent of kiss rings if the name is well known enough. At the very least can reviewers be compensated and the process be double-blind?!? I mean come on!
I’ve been trying to think of another system and quite honestly the only real answer is peer-review by being rewarded for better results. Who gets to decide better results? Well, in markets thats done through profit and losses. So the better system must take advantage of such an incentive. Currently, there is only profit (if you play ball) and no real loss in research, and therefore no incentive to get the right answers for the right reasons.
thank you for having the chutzpah to just come out and say what everyone knows is true…
ps- we’ve all had our “Maui” conferences that we’ve attended. My maui was a beautiful mountain town in switzerland.

My experience with reviewers is that on the whole their comments have resulted in a considerably improved paper and I have learned a lot from them. A few clearly were out of their depth or read what they expected to see rather than what was written. My personal preference would be double blind review or completely open.
I look on reviewing tasks as an obligation for participating in science. It is my role to help good papers be better and poor papers are a learning experience for the authors. Poor papers take a lot more effort to review.

Dumping Peer review makes sense: over time it locks in orthodoxy of thinking with entrenched, and quite possibly low level, performers given a power via the review process to rein-in new developments.
The alternative which makes sense is Support Review/Endorsement. Scientists should publish what they can, when they can – get it out there to be debated. The problem really rests with the Journals who must pick and choose what to publish (the current review system both helps them to decide what to publish, and provides a mechanism for them to decide for themselves – by choosing the reviewers – but not appear to be actually making the choices).
For a Positive Review/Endorsement approach: get your paper written, and get prominent people (scientists or whoever) to endorse it to persuade a Journal to publish. The writer may need to convince peers or peer-equivalents to endorse their paper to get it published, but if they can’t do that, likely it isn’t worth publishing. All the Journals need to do is decide on the basis of what papers they like, and/or appears credible, assisted by who is prepared to endorse the paper.
Not a perfect system, but less imperfect than the current peer review system.

j_the_d, as you know, your comment was in moderation and I didn’t see it when I last posted. Interesting that we both brought up Clarke’s quote.
However, you are not correct. Transistors were only a breakthrough in how they worked and how small they could be. Vacuum tubes and relays perform similar tasks. A transistor is easily explained, it’s not complicated, especially to someone who understands even the basics of electricity. So is a laser, although the laboratory behemoths in the 60s can barely be compared with the tiny counterparts that read your DVD. In fact, for a while lasers were a solution looking for a problem.
Can you actually compare the step-by-step-by-step progress of the computer industry since WW2 with the breakthrough research done during the Manhattan Project, or by the Curies, or by Einstein or Planck or… well, as the point of the post, any of the greats before the current epoch?
I bet only a very few people can even NAME a modern Scientist, with the possible exception of Hawking. Einstein’s picture is instantly recognized by pretty much everyone on the planet.
And no, I’m not saying progress has stagnated, although I posted the Big Bang Theory clip because it’s hilarious. Things have changed, a lot. I suspect a lot of the change in how Science is done was because the US needed to keep the “secrets” of The Bomb from becoming too widely known.
Any reasonably intelligent person extracted from the 1940s to today, or even the 20s or earlier, would integrate just fine, although they might not like the level of communication we’ve achieved. Text messages? Phone calls in the car? Discussing deep topics with a literally world-wide audience, all participating in real time? To my parents’ generation, it’s too much, but it’s not voodoo.

“All the reviewers are anonymous. That is, they know your name but you do not know theirs. This is the first red flag: unless you plan to do something really bad, why do you insists being anonymous? ”
… wrote the essayist and published under a pseudonym. So much for his/her credibility.

While I have not reviewed all comments, the elimination of anonymous review is not an answer. That suggestion ignores the power relations that exist in science. It is true, however, that anonymity often leads to irresponsible behavior. With internet technology, we can have the protection of anonymity while preserving responsible behavior.
Extended abstract (5 min. read):
Stodolsky, D. S. (2002). Computer-network based democracy: Scientific communication as a basis for governance. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Knowledge Management in e-Government, 7, 127-137.
http://dss.secureid.org/stories/storyReader$14
Comprehensive
Stodolsky, D. S. (1995). Consensus Journals: Invitational journals based upon peer review. The Information Society, 11(4). [1994 version in N. P. Gleditsch, P. H. Enckell, & J. Burchardt (Eds.), Det videnskabelige tidsskrift (The scientific journal) (pp. 151-160). Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. (Tema NORD 1994: 574)]
http://dss.secureid.org/stories/storyReader$19