Peer Evil – the rotten business model of modern science

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.