Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@weschenbach on X, blog at Skating Under The Ice)
We’re told, endlessly, that science is a self-correcting machine. A pristine engine of truth where bad ideas are discarded, and good ones rise to the top like cream. We are told to “Trust The Science™“ because it has passed the magical, mystical trial known as Peer Review.
Bad news. The machine is broken, the cream is curdled milk, and the gatekeepers are asleep at the switch—or worse, they’re selling tickets to the vandals.
A new study out of Northwestern University, entitled Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate, study uncovers, has just pulled back the curtain on what many have said for years. It turns out that “organized scientific fraud” isn’t just a few rogue grad students fudging a data point. No. It is a global, industrial-scale operation.
According to the study, we are now dealing with “sophisticated global networks” that function essentially as criminal organizations. They aren’t just faking results; they are manufacturing entire fake scientific careers. They sell authorship slots on bogus papers like they’re selling condos in Florida.
You want to be a “First Author” on a groundbreaking physics paper? That’ll be $5,000. You want to be a co-author? We have a discount on aisle three.
The study notes that this fraud is “outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications.” Think about that. The cancer is growing faster than the host.
YIKES!
And the peer-review system, that vaunted shield that is supposed to protect us from error? It’s acting less like a shield and more like a sieve.
But wait. Before we blame this all on shadowy “criminal networks” and nameless paper mills overseas, let’s look a little closer to home. Because the rot isn’t just coming from outside the house. It’s coming from the basement.
I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve lived it.
Years ago, I wrote about my peer-review experiences with Dr. Michael Mann, author of the infamous “Hockey Stick.” I called him a “Smooth Operator“, and I meant it. In the climate world, “peer review” has too often morphed into “pal review.” It’s a cozy club where friends rubber-stamp friends’ papers and, more importantly, block the publication of a study from anyone like me who dares to question the “Consensus.”
And as I detailed in “Freedom of Information, My Okole“, I’ve spent years asking for the data and code behind these taxpayer-funded studies. And what do I get? Stonewalling. Refusals. As Phil Jones told Warwick Hughes, “Why should I show you my data when you only want to find something wrong with it?”
That is not science. That is a priesthood protecting its dogma.
The current peer-review system is a black box. An editor sends a paper to two or three anonymous reviewers. If those reviewers are the author’s pals, the paper gets a pass. If the author is an outsider, or a skeptic, the reviewers can kill the paper in secret, with no accountability, for reasons that have nothing to do with the science and everything to do with protecting their turf.
Of course, only an extremely rare, perfectly honest reviewer is going to allow the publication of any study that demolishes the very foundations of the work that he’s spent his life building and expounding. As Upton Sinclair famously explained, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. I call that the “Sinclair Trap”, and it’s far too easy to fall into.
Unfortunately, the Sinclair Trap is even worse for scientists because it’s not just money. I’ve said before that “Science is a blood sport”. What I meant was that any new scientific discovery or understanding has the possibility of being very costly, not just to the salary, but to the prized professional reputation of the holders of the previous view.
It doesn’t have to be costly if the scientist whose prior work is discredited is honest, open about it, and willing to move forward and embrace and further the new understanding.
But that’s not every scientist.
And now, we see the result. A system so opaque and unaccountable that it can be gamed by criminal syndicates on one end and ideological gatekeepers on the other.
So, what do we do? Do we just throw up our hands and say “Science is hard”?
No. Just no.
We need a total overhaul. A complete tear-down of the secrecy that allows this problem to thrive in the dark.
I’ve proposed a solution before, and I’ll propose it again. I call it Peer Review Plus.
Here’s how it works. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and it would solve 90% of these problems overnight.
First, you keep the traditional peer review. But here is the kicker: You publish everything.
When a paper is published, you don’t just publish the paper. You publish the entire correspondence between the authors and the reviewers. You publish the reviewers’ and editors’ names. You publish their objections, and the authors’ rebuttals.
Let the world see how the sausage was made. If a reviewer gave a paper a pass because they’re pals, it will be obvious. If a reviewer blocked a paper because they didn’t like the conclusion, that will be obvious too.
But I’d go further.
We should also publish any valuable rejected papers.
Science proceeds by falsification. When a paper is rejected, it’s usually because a reviewer claims to have found a flaw. That falsification, valid or not, is a valuable piece of scientific data. But right now, it’s thrown in the trash bin of history.
If a reviewer rejects my paper, I want that rejection—and my answer to it—on the public record. Let the community decide if the rejection was valid or if it was just gatekeeping.
We also need an “Open Review” system where publishing the data and code are mandatory. As my friend Mosh used to say “No code, no data, no science”. This should result in “No publication”. Period.
And then, once it’s published, open the floor. Allow moderated, non-anonymous comments on the web from the larger scientific community and the public. The truth is that this public peer review by the larger world is the only truly valuable review.
The Northwestern study says we need to “police ourselves better.” They’re half right. We don’t need more police. We need more lights and more transparency. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Right now, the scientific establishment is operating in a windowless room, and the mold is taking over.
We need to stop treating “Peer Reviewed” as a stamp of divine truth and start treating it for what it is: a fallible, human, and currently deeply corruptible process.
Until we pry the doors open and let the public see who is paying whom, who is reviewing whom, what the objections to the study were, and where the data actually is, this fraud will continue. The paper mills will keep churning, the pals will keep reviewing, and the public trust in science will continue its long, slow slide into the gutter.
Both the public and the scientists deserve better.
w.
PS—After writing the above, I thought I’d use perplexity to educate me on the history of peer-review. As always, there’s more for me to learn. This is a good question for AI, since the history is not a highly debated subject. I asked:
What is the history of the peer-review process in scientific publication? Who pushed for it? Who objected to it?
I included my standard instructions about not guessing, using primary sources, and the like. Here’s the response:
===
Peer review in scientific publishing developed gradually from informal editorial consultation in the seventeenth century to standardized external refereeing after the Second World War, with strong institutional support from major learned societies and leading journals, and persistent criticism from scientists and methodologists who argued that it is conservative, biased, and often unreliable. No single individual “invented” modern peer review, and surviving historical documentation does not support attributing it to one specific person; rather, it emerged through incremental practices at journals such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and later formal policies at journals such as Nature. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Early editorial review (17th–18th centuries)
• In 1665, Henry Oldenburg began editing Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and sought advice from knowledgeable colleagues to decide which submissions to print, which historians regard as a precursor to formal refereeing, although it was not systematic external peer review in the modern sense. [2] [8] [7]
• In the eighteenth century, the Royal Society created a Committee of Papers that could accept, postpone, reject, or refer manuscripts to designated members for expert evaluation, embedding internal scientific judgment into the journal’s constitution but still without standardized, anonymous external review. [3] [8] [7]
Nineteenth‑century institutionalization
• During the nineteenth century, Philosophical Transactions and other society journals increasingly used written reports from selected referees, often Fellows of the society, to guide publication decisions, making the process more formal and collective than Oldenburg’s largely personal editorial control. [7] [3]
• Historians of science emphasize that practices varied widely among journals and disciplines, and that even where referee reports existed, they were not yet a universal or uniform requirement for all scientific papers. [4] [2]
Twentieth‑century “modern” peer review
• After the Second World War, rapid growth in the number of manuscripts, expansion of specialized fields, and rising journal prestige led many journals to adopt routine external refereeing by domain experts, which is often identified as the birth of “modern” peer review. [9] [1] [4]
• By the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading journals such as Nature had formal peer review systems, and the term “peer review” itself came into widespread use, supported by citation-tracking infrastructures that rewarded publication in peer‑reviewed venues. [10] [4] [9]
Who pushed for peer review?
• Documentary evidence shows that officers and councils of learned societies, particularly the Royal Society of London and similar bodies in Europe and North America, pushed for more systematic expert evaluation to protect scientific reputation, manage limited printing budgets, and filter the growing volume of submissions. [2] [3] [7]
• Editors and publishers of major journals in medicine and the natural sciences in the mid‑twentieth century promoted external peer review as a quality‑control and gatekeeping mechanism, and later governmental and funding agencies reinforced its use by tying research assessment and career advancement to publication in peer‑reviewed outlets. [6] [1] [4]
Who objected to peer review?
• Historical and contemporary analyses document objections from prominent scientists, including Albert Einstein, who was notably resistant when one of his papers was subjected to anonymous external review, as well as from later critics who argue that peer review can suppress innovative or unconventional work. [5] [11]
• Methodological critiques in the biomedical and social‑science literature have highlighted problems such as low inter‑reviewer agreement, bias, conservative preference for established paradigms, and limited ability to detect errors or fraud, and some scholars have called for major reforms or even abolition of traditional pre‑publication peer review in favor of alternative models. [12] [13] [1] [6]
Limitations: The surviving primary records (editorial minutes, correspondence, referee reports) are incomplete and uneven across journals, so attributions of “first use” and lists of specific individuals who pushed or objected are necessarily partial, and no primary source provides a complete, definitive chronology for all disciplines. [14] [7] [2]
[1](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11215012/)
[2](https://ethos.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/19/)
[3](https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/philosophicaltransactions/brief-history-of-phil-trans/phil-trans-in-19th-century/)
[4](https://blog.f1000.com/2020/01/31/a-brief-history-of-peer-review/)
[5](https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-einstein-did-too-27405)
[6](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4975196/)
[7](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4360128/)
[8](https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/philosophicaltransactions/brief-history-of-phil-trans/phil-trans-in-18th-century/)
[9](https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/broad/commkit/peer-review-a-historical-perspective/)
[10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGuaua10oRE)
[11](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review)
[12](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12127284/)
[13](https://mediatheoryjournal.org/2018/09/03/mieke-bal-lets-abolish-the-peer-review-system/)
[14](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03287-4)
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Naw, the gatekeepers are pissing in the milk.
There’s another thing to add to peer review plus — preregistration. Register every single study, experiment, investigation, all scientific work, before beginning. It wouldn’t have to be immediately publicly visible, but if not, it needs a date certain upon which it becomes visible, warts and all. All correspondence has to be logged to it. All funding, all lab notes, all results, all comments — everything.
Otherwise it is all too easy to hide failed experiments or unwanted results.
At the very least do this for all government-funded work, which I would prefer to completely eliminate, but as long as they’re going to steal my taxes, I want complete logs of all the science they fund with public money. No money until the project has been registered.
The most stupid way to do science: Recent Whitehouse announcement/
USHERING IN A NEW ERA OF DISCOVERY: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order launching the Genesis Mission, a new national effort to use artificial intelligence (AI) to transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery.
This grows out of the current notion that grand projects involving “many great minds” communicating mostly electronically between institutions (including money for occasional in person meetings) are the way to go. There is a place for large projects, but they have to include ways to evaluate one’s collaborators at a distance such as blank or spiked samples included in a run.
My experience is the most fruitful collaborations grow organically from mutual interests. And, actual new ideas come from individuals, not groups.
A lot of “government funded science” is actually contracts to perform an elaborately described set of experiments. eg, NSF in the US. In other words, Preregistered as Scarecrow recommends. At least some of these turn out to be perseveration in a line of research which would have been rapidly dropped or radically changed on the basis of initial results.
There have to be ways to alter a trajectory without prejudice when new information or results warrant this. For example, hundreds of studies were done with a set of potential analgesics. My first experiment revealed that this class of drugs was so aversive to rats that they squealed and peed and shit all over me when picked up the following day. I published this and dropped the whole line.
Because all tests showed this class had 0 (zero) potential for addiction, it was proposed as a veterinary analgesic. Mercifully after a few trials, it disappeared into the ether. Even this would not have happened if there had been some communication between technicians and bosses. It took administration by actual practicing vets’ observations to kill it.
Sounds like that would have been a good rat deterrent.
I agree with you.
And that is why it is so important that you and people like you continue to publish here your findings where others can comment on or correct your work.
Just a shame that the MSM don’t also agree with you.
Here’s a link I had saved from three years ago.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
My own notes from then …
I would be shocked if much of the problem is not a deliberate activity of the Chinese communists. I suspect their money is funding fake climate studies with bribed peer reviewers in a deliberate part of their war against the rest of the world. How better to diminish their enemies than ruin their economies with idiotic energy policies while they make money selling solar panels made with coal energy.
No need to stretch your ideology that specifically. Plain old money is incentive enough. Government bureaucrats want to expand their fiefdoms by spending more of other people’s money, ethically-challenged people want an easy way to get their hands on some of that money and need to boost their resume, other ethically challenged people see a way to provide that boost, and the race is on.
Why would the CCP need to provide any money at all when Western governments provide plenty on their own?
Marginal students are indoctrinated with the mantra that college and a four-year sheepskin are the keys to success. Colleges salivate at all that student loan tuition and need marginal professors to teach those marginal students. They both require new marginal fields to remain employed and in school. Marginal quality increases the quantity that survive the full four years because 3.5 years isn’t enough to get that prized sheepskin. Marginal students and faculty know they are marginal and looked down upon, so they rouse the rabble to make wokism more important than rigor and usefulness.
No Communist is capable of planning such own goals.
When the elites of your country encourage the import of the dregs from Third World countries, as the US has been doing for at least 40 years, and they procreate like rabbits, you will inevitably become a chaotic, crime-ridden Third World country.
There is no escape.
YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW.
Then prepare for a shock.
China wouldn’t be anywhere near where they are now without the help of the west (Bilderberger, Lima Agreements etc).
The downfall started with the hippie era, at a time when China was a 4th world country,
and though there were a handful of major spying scandals I’m not aware that China was part of them;
most probably because it ain’t easy for chinese spies to blend in with the population to keep a low profile in the west.
And this downfall effected all domains – be it education,politics,science,culture etc.
And no chinese to be found.
And though there is a very specific pattern to be found – it is absolutely not chinese.
En contraire – there are specific similarities in regards to the opium wars that devastated China.
Trump is right with his claim that the AGW scam was made for china – but not by them.
Just look at the origins of the ice age and then warming scam – no chinese to be found.
And what’s that nonsense with Chinas ” war against the rest of the world” .
It’s not China that is waging war all around the planet( and just about to start another one right now ) and who is massively involved in every major conflict, nor are the color revolution NGO’s
and their billionaire owners based in China, nor it’s the chinese who have close ties to Epstein to blackmail the hell out of politicians.
The chinese still buy your politicians fair and square with direct bribes or by buying Hunter Bidens Kindergarten arts for 100K the piece before they flush it down the toilet.
On the other hand, the West wouldn’t be anywhere at all without China – gunpowder, moveable type, porcelain, magnets, public service by competitive exam, paper . . .
Or consider the Muslim influence – Arabic numerals (including that wonderful concept of nothing at all, zero), algebra, even the name “alcohol” is derived from Arabic, and so is “coffee” (amongst many others).
Fair’s fair, and who cares? Nothing wrong with appropriating another’s achievements, and claiming them as your own.<g>
Was it Muslim influence, or Arab influence? And where is the Muslim world now? Still stuck in the 8th century.
Well, the US fled Afghanistan in a bit of a panic, and the Iraq withdrawal wasn’t a lot better. The North Vietnamese didn’t have much in way of air power, artillery, or naval power, but the US forces fled in panic, anyway.
What do you mean by “the west”? Is that just anybody who agrees with you, or something else? Maybe you are thinking in religious terms – how do classify Jews and Buddhists? Western or Eastern?
Please excuse me while I laugh. You need to be a bit more subtle with your propaganda. China’s must be pretty good – they’ve convinced the rest of the world to buy lots of Chinese stuff, and even that China has got military stuff that the US can only dream about.
Probably all lies, eh? My Chinese motor vehicle is obviously rubbish, inferior to American vehicles, and will fall apart quite soon. Maybe the seven year warranty and capped price service is imaginary too. That’s what I get for being ignorant and gullible, I guess.
You’re probably right.
Iran has hypersonic rockets,while you don’t.
Wouldn’t call this 8th century.
Russia helped North Korea and Iran with building rockets with variable trajectories at 10 Mach.
China and Russia likely are helping each other in many areas.
If these four do not act as a unit, the West would eat them for breakfast.
India will eventually be number five.
These five countries have an abundance of STEM professionals and trade schools
The idiocies and hubris of the West is driving these five together
https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/31006002892?profile=RESIZE_710x
You can click on the red text to see a large image.
Note, Spain was already in decline during 1550 and after.
The death blow came in 1588, the destruction of the Armada, which used up almost all 100-y-old trees in Spain.
This chart shows, for the past 5000 years, the output of the sun has varied, which caused the rise and fall of empire, nations and city states.
Well Mr Flynn,
1st I was exclusively talking about the current timeframe(hippie and cooling scare onwards ).
I wasn’t giving an overall history lesson.
2nd) The Arab numbers ain’t Arab at all, neither is the 0.
Both were stol… culturally appropriated from india after muslims conqu.__ colonized them.
Muslims only Modi -fied the symbols.
Same goes with Algebra(crazy conspiracy incoming) : Al Qwarizmi was a translater of Hindhu texts(the small part that hasn’t been destroyed alongside the extermination of Bhuddists – India was mostly Bhuddist at that time, at least in the west).
It is absolutely unlikely that Hindhus in thousands of years of brilliant minds didn’t came up with Algorithms, but as soon as they conquered India,the first muslim that started the astronomical and mathematical translations was the genuis who discovered it,especially as Qwarizmi didn’t even grew up with the Hindhu decimal system.
Qwarizmi did what he always did – he translated, but pretended that the Hindhu book with formulas didn’t exist as sold it as his invention.
Same with Algebra – Diophantos was way earlier there and Hindhus maybe even before him.
And Alcohol?
Alcohol is the devilstuff in Islam,absolutely haram,except that rivers of wine flow in muslim paradise – a lack of religious logic,I’d assume.
Alcohol is as old as prostitution,way older than the oldest traces of alcohol found
Giving names ain’t an achievement.
You should have named the Damascus steel to make a point.
But as I said, you missed my point.
This is not about history or cultural appropriation(a must and nonsense to even talk about it outside the woke realm.)
Absolutely. You have waffled on at length without quoting a single thing I said – and I apologise for not quoting you before, but my comment appeared immediately after yours, which was –
That’s your opinion, which is as equally valueless as mine.
All this started because you said –
and later said –
You can hopefully see that your first statement might be considered derogatory to the Chinese in general, and your second some irrelevant word salad trying to avoid being held accountable for your first.
Maybe you could say whether you believe that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter? Or can’t you make up your mind?
Discussions about other cultures or political systems doesn’t seem to relate to “peer review”, but knowing your stance on the mythical “greenhouse effect” (which appears to be related to the bizarre belief that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter), might help me understand if you have opinions worth valuing or not.
Then see the next post, where ravenrise is a blatant chinese infiltrator claiming that it’s all done by America to stop developing nations from developing, and China is heroically saving the world. It’s fascinating in a car-crash kind of way…
As long as they save a bit for me, I don’t mind. Mr Flexibility, that’s me. When the times change, so do I. So far, so good.
When the times change, I reset my watch. 🙂
Peer/pal review has gone the way of the MSM. Bias, often paid for, rules the roost. It’s sad but the truth is nothing controversial can be trusted without your proper vetting. Nothing.
We all know peer review is rubber stamping, cronyism, political etc but not science. What i would love to know is how this can be fixed? Do we have any scientist with morals & influence left to at least flick the switch towards redemption? I hope so.
The solution is actually a two-part one for the climate issue: yes, we need scientists to call out the abuse in details that cannot be disputed from their level of expertise, but that’s where part 2 comes in: they need to describe the problems to objective, unbiased journalists who can then accurately report this all to the greater public. But right now we don’t have a news reporting media, we have a propaganda news reporting media which entirely excludes viewpoints from skeptic climate scientists. The problem even applies to the angle of the climate issue which doesn’t involve science, namely the accusation that ‘leaked industry memos reveal skeptic scientists are on the payroll of Big Oil to spread disinformation.’ One of the most idiotic examples of that in recent years was no less than a paper in the Environmental Research Letters journal that actually claimed to be a peer-reviewed study, concerning ‘industry disinformation efforts,’ As I detailed in my 11/26/22 WUWT guest post, the paper based its claims on a specific never-implemented memo set, thus its accusations were totally without merit. If only it was possible to expose who the ‘peer reviewers’ were of that paper; I’d bet big dollars that those anonymous reviewers (say, for example, maybe this one? had themselves been repeating that same basic meritless accusation about that two memo set for years.
Thank you for this post, Willis. Very interesting.
“When a paper is published, you don’t just publish the paper. You publish the entire correspondence between the authors and the reviewers. You publish the reviewers’ and editors’ names. You publish their objections, and the authors’ rebuttals.”
I refer to Guy Callendar’s attribution of reported warming to rising concentrations of CO2, published in 1938 by the Royal Meteorological Society. A discussion meeting was held, a transcript of which was included with the main article. Serious objections to his hypothesis were expressed by the participating meteorological experts, along with his response. This was an excellent way to publish his work, even though it presented a highly questionable claim.
What was discussed in that meeting, and what objections were noted? And why is that record valuable to us now? More here. A link to a pdf of the original article is included.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/04/06/open-thread-138/#comment-4058322
Please keep up the good work.
100 years ago, it was common to have papers read at Engineering Society meetings, and the published paper would have a transcript of the Q&A session that followed the reading. The Q&A session can be equally if not more informative than the paper itself. This is not a lot different than how WUWT is run when the author participates in the discussion.
Things can get quite testy during the sausage making. I once was the editor for a long, complex paper. I had three positive reviews from highly qualified scientists and after issues pointed out were dealt with, the paper was published. Well, the paper had an alternative interpretation to a model espoused by another scientist, and he decided to submit a comment to argue against the paper. So far, everything was above board. But the author of the comment claimed that I was biased against him merely because I had not asked him to review the original paper. He insisted that I not be the editor of the comment, despite the fact that I had “no dog in this hunt”. I was delighted not to have any more dealings with this mess. Ahh, we are just scientists searching for the truth.
There is another method which is best summed up in the quote, “Publication of articles is a conversation.”
Years ago people submitted articles and the journal published them. Criticism is published after someone had an interest to review the article and write to the editor suggesting corrections of omissions that affected the conclusions. A good example of this is 1895 article by Arrhenius suggesting that the earth would warm a certain amount if the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere were increased. The paper contained mathematical flaws which were immediately noticed by Mach who wrote to say so, arriving at a much smaller number of degrees.
This conversation was joined by several others eventually resulting in a partial withdrawal of the original claims, but Arrhenius never fully admitted to his conceptual and procedural errors. Actually, he wrote two backdown articles.
So guess which paper is cited by climate alarmists? The original 1895 article, of course, because it erroneously supports the “narrative”.
The reason given for implementing a review process was to save paper and printing costs. This is no longer a valid reason because it cost almost nothing to publish on line for all to read and all to review. In fact, this is what Twitter/X became. One can argue WUWT is a similar idea bounding arena. Good for us.
It would be far better for an author to “check with some friends” or even enemies BEFORE publishing an article, peer review at the publication being completely unnecessary. IF you want to put your name to a pile of manipulated hogwash like MBH98, do so and suffer the consequences.
A ‘serious journal” them takes on the appearance of a Ground News style collection and filtering service, the popularity of which is based on their ability to do a proper job of finding share-worthy information and articles.
This is a return to the earlier method of communication where, as Willis notes, everything is published and your reputation is created by your contributions to science, not what is at the time a popular opinion.
I used to publish engineering papers at refereed conferences. My employer had rules before I could release the paper, one of which was that I had to subject my paper to internal review by my peers. This was before it was submitted for consideration at the conference. Generally, there was little problem getting through the conference’s peer review.
Surely the authors and their peer reviewers should declare their funding, This would in part expose their bias.
That’s a normal requirement of the authors, I always declared my funding and it was included as a footnote to the publication.
Eschenbach, you are a treasure. Thank you.
Thanks, Duke, your kind words are appreciated.
w.
A guiding light for all of us
“If a reviewer rejects my paper, I want that rejection—and my answer to it—on the public record…” OK, but ouch, already too much information. It would be interesting though if they have to produce the often short nonsense suggesting censorship like “it’s already been done” which I have gotten.
There used to be journals that posted the reviewers names. I am fairly familiar with marine science papers, mostly below the atmosphere, and while there was some bias there has been, along with others, centralization of journals, libraries and specimen collections. As I have posted before “Impact Factors” are both advertising and poor evaluators. Seems that there is much less concern there than from statistics, but it exists not without critics.
Metcalfe, N. B. 1995. Serious bias in journal impact factors. Trends Ecol. Evol. 10(11):461. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)89182-X
Frankly, don’t know best way to fix a system that awards lack of homework. Publish everything is more ouch but there are many other forms of review than the current “peer.” However, there may be a creep into citing unpublished manuscripts, letters, etc.
Another problem from the fraud link–“Richardson and his colleagues also collected lists of de-indexed journals, which are scholarly journals that have been removed from databases for failing to meet certain quality or ethical standards.” Some like Cuvier and Valencinnes are now at risk for “ethics” which we supposedly are better at now.
>> Peer-Reviewing Peer Review
Actually, I believe the necessary tools are in place already, they just need to be enforced, like it is done in other fields if science.
If it turns out that
– Mann’s paper did not include a mathematical analysis of a potential selection bias for the proxies (selecting different proxies likely affects the outcome of the reconstruction, so there is a missing source of uncertainty not formulated in a mathematical expression for any of his papers I know)
– older analyses of older climate models concluding “accuracy” and “skill fullness” while more modern models directly contradict these conclusions (in particular CMIP6 models with higher resolution and corrected physics calculate significant different trends for key parameters compared to similar older models)
The natural progression in science would be either a correction or withdrawal of the incomplete or faulty analysis or maybe a peer reviewed comment addressing the issue.
None of this seems to be happening for older faulty climate science papers discrediting the whole field, but like I said the mechanisms are there and work fine in other fields.
Publishing everything is an excellent idea and has been done. The EGU has such open source peer reviewed publications. While reviews can still be completed anonymously if desired, at least you can still read them.
When I was Chief Editor of MWR and JAS, we always shared reviews with other reviewers. Completely open reviews to everyone is the next step which is much easier now technically.
Thanks for highlighting this issue which has been easily abused
Hi Roger. I hope you didn’t have to wait too long to have your comment approved. I did a double take when I saw your name on a comment awaiting moderation.
Hope you are well.
Regards,
Bob
Hi Bob – Thanks for checking. 🙂 It was less than 5 minutes. Roger
Dang! You’re obviously a very important person.
Me, I think a “committee” intently pores over my posts, which can take a long period of time. Other times, quite quick. I don’t know why, because I don’t think any of my comments have actually been censored. I don’t keep records.
I’ve never enquired because I accept Anthony’s authority. It might confuse other commenters who are expecting a snappy reply. Or it might not.
No amount of reform is going to change the current system. They’ll just find more ways to thwart your goals, and in a world where people no longer read, just absorb ten second videos, a concerted effort to tell them that there’s no difference between men and women gets traction.
All science needs to be privatized. We need climate models? Fine. Make all the data free to use, establish a $10 billion prize for whoever produces, one year from now, the climate model most accurate 10 years later and $100 billion for the most accurate 10 years after that.
How are we getting to space these days? Private companies doing the science in fierce competition with each other.
Do you think you’d get any climate models? Yes you would. There would be start ups seeking funding, there would be established companies jumping into the race, just for the prestige of winning, let alone the money. The number of “thumbs on the scale” would be zero. The science that produces wrong answers would be discarded out of hand. When you ask them how they did it, the winners would give you answers based on actual science because that’s the only way to win the prize.
You’d get climate models that work based on science that is honest, and it would cost a lot less than the idiotic money burning furnace that is climate science today.
I’m reminded of the arguments dealing with the switch in figure skating judging from the old 6.0 ordinal based system to the current system based on elements. Did it remove corruption? No. But now you can see how they are doing it.
I don’t know the details, but somebody might find a way to avoid scrutiny if there is enough money involved.
It would be very difficult. There are technical specialists determining IF a claimed element is actually performed. Then there are grade of execution (GOE) marks by the judges, who mark each element. Then there are program component (PC) scores, also from the judges. The PC scores, which are a bit nebulous, are where the normal fudging goes on, but it’s hard to push things too far without looking silly. On top of all this, all of the elements are reviewable on video. Compared to the old ordinal based 6.0 system with only two highly subjective marks, the new system is orders of magnitude more transparent.
Chris, I’m not disagreeing that
All sorts of things are purposely designed to be very hard to outwit, but occasionally even I am amazed at the ingenuity of the outwitters – whether motivated by greed, patriotism, self-interest – or just self satisfaction. And I’m pretty hard to amaze, I think!
No offence intended. Some people think things are totally impossible – until someone does them.
The first paper I submitted to a journal (in the Springer stable) was on temperatures in the Southern Ocean and how they showed up major error in the climate models. The two reviewers both recommended rejection, using a lot of gobbledegook that made no sense. I replied that the paper was deliberately simple in order to show the model error clearly. One reviewer withdrew, the other repeated the gobbledegook. Ten(!) more reviewers later, and 11 months after I submitted the paper, the editor found a second reviewer to recommend rejection. The editor then sent me a personal message to say the paper had been rejected, adding that the journal did not need “yet another paper critical of climate models”. I am not aware of that journal ever having published a paper critical of the climate models, but maybe they did. I complained to the journal’s board, but they said they gave free reign to editors. For subsequent papers, I went to a different journal – but for a long time I kept getting discount offers from Springer.
Willis – I totally support your ideas on this. Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant – an idea that traces back to Louis Brandeis, 1913(from memory), a brilliant reformist US Supreme Court judge. Could his ilk be appointed today?
Springer has a wonderful business model which produces hundreds of millions of Euros in profits each year. You sometimes charge people to publish their fantasies, and have them “reviewed” by other fantasists at no cost. Then you steal the copyrights, and sell the authors IP back to them at a vast profit.
There’s more, but that’s it in a nutshell.
Of course, if you publish “peer reviewed” computer nonsense, you then blame the person who paid your publishing fee, and, as they obviously dishonest, don’t give them a refund. It’s pay to publish – no refunds.
Science? Who needs science – this is about money!
We’re close to having AI as a more reliable, unbiased reviewer. The risk is that the game morphs into fooling reviewer AI to agreement. And what better tool to use to architect the paper than another AI.
I think you are being incredibly naive in thinking AI will be unbiased.
AI will be unbiased in terms of intention.
AI will be biased in so far as its training data has introduced bias but that’s unavoidable in any practical sense. I’m willing to believe the currently there’s no great advocacy going on in selecting data for the models. For example, all scientific papers will be included, not just the ones supporting a point of view.
But IMO, the main issue Willis is covering here is gatekeeping and that’s an intentional advocacy bias that AI wont be adding.
I’m with Erik on this, it’s all about the “training” of the algorithm. AI will simply be trotted out as the next unassailable “authority” once “trained” to spit out the “approved” answers.
And will encourage intellectual laziness in the process.
ALL AI’s we have are woke and very reluctant to giving us real data that violates the current big narratives about protected groups, climate etc.
Which means they are compriomsed and control.
And you think a magic miracle will happen in favor of peer review?
Are you a 6 year old girl’
If they’re woke it’s because that reflects our society and the information we’re producing that’s used in training.
There’s more than the usual levels of paranoia on this forum recently.
I spent the decade of the 70s in grad school in visual psychophysics in the Psych dept at Northwestern .
The system was largely <em>Pal</em> review even then .
I was included in the author list of papers I had done a bit of data collection on , but didn’t even know a paper had been published until I found out I was listed among the co-authors .
A lot was , and clearly still is , driven by the <em>Publish or Perish</em> criterion for advancement and tenure — along with almost total government funding via grant applications . It’s a reason why you see lists of a dozen or more` authors on many papers .
The system rewarded mediocrity and inconsequentiality .
I learned APL and too much math , and thereby lost my tenure in grad school sans PhD when I had a significant insight which was essentially undergrad multidimensional statistics .
“We need a total overhaul.”
Totally agree. In this internet world is peer review adding to scientific innovation or subtracting from it? Does the h-index of a journal mean anything anymore? Is peer-review anachronistic? I suspect Einstein was right.
My thoughts:
Change to a culture where publishing is NEVER done because it’s “needed” for promotion or tenure. Only publish if there is something to report. There is way too much “research” being done. Dramatically reducing government funding may be the only way to get there – in the golden age of scientific discovery, scientific research was funded by benefactors who actually knew the people they were giving money to.
My thoughts:
Change to a culture where publishing is NEVER done because it’s “needed” for promotion or tenure. Only publish if there is something to report. There is way too much “research” being done. Dramatically reducing government funding may be the only way to get there – in the golden age of scientific discovery, scientific research was funded by benefactors who actually knew the people they were giving money to.
Um, please excuse my ignorance, but are papers that present a hypothesis that are submitted for review & publication required to include the author’s version of a Null Hypothesis?
So here is the question, are other scientific fields peer review process as suspect as climate science? If so which ones?
How about political science or social science?
Yes I would suspect them but I have a hard time thinking of them as science.
I asked Copilot AI, “Why are juries required to turn in only unanimous results … always 12 to zero?” The answer includes some ideas that might add to this discussion.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Unanimity ensures that guilt is proven to the highest standard. If even one juror has reasonable doubt, the defendant cannot be convicted.
Fairness & Legitimacy: A unanimous verdict signals that the decision reflects the collective conscience of the community, not just a majority opinion.
Protection Against Bias: It prevents small groups of jurors from dominating or railroading others, forcing deliberation until all agree.
Symbolic Strength of 12: Twelve jurors were thought to provide a broad cross-section of society, making verdicts more representative and credible.
Checks on Power: The Framers of the Constitution believed unanimity was essential to prevent tyranny and ensure justice was not rushed or politically manipulated
In the world of Global Warming publications, the “birds of a feather” authors self-select themselves into a juries of unanimous truth.
The wonderful majority, who decide that the atom is indivisible, disease is due to miasmas, and that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter!
No room for people like Newton, Einstein, or Feynman, then.
The Law, Justice, guilt and innocence are human constructs. What is taboo in one culture maybe a virtue in another, however perverse. The workings of the physical world is a given outside human control and therefore a totally different proposition.