Peer Review: A Good Way to Detect Flaws in Methodology or a Good Way to Silence Heresy?
Back in the day, when the war against junk science was being fought in earnest, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote the following about peer review: "submission to the scrutiny of the scientific community is a component of 'good science,' in part because it increases the likelihood that substantive flaws in methodology will be detected". Today of course we know that most research reported as scientific knowledge in the journals is false. Worse yet, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the peer review process has been hijacked and turned instead to the purpose of safeguarding the prevailing dogma so that "truly original findings may be delayed or rejected" while "[p]apers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile". These recent observations confirm what I've suspected in the two years since deposing a notorious expert witness who once was regularly excluded as a peddler of junk but who is now a referee for a prominent journal: somehow, some way, the barbarians have become the gatekeepers.
The end may be approaching for peer review, however. Of peer review it has recently been written: "Peer review eludes the immune system of science since it has now been accepted by other bureaucracies as intrinsically valid, such that any residual individual decision-making (no matter how effective in real-world terms) is regarded as intrinsically unreliable (self-interested and corrupt). Thus the endemic failures of peer review merely trigger demands for ever more elaborate and widespread peer review." In the blogosphere you"ll find that the frustration of those whose papers have been delayed or sabotaged by referees more intent on preserving the paradigm that supports them than getting closer to the truth is resonating. Good examples of those concerns and a call to end the ability of reviewers to hide behind their anonymity can be found at Marginal Revolution and Seth's Blog.
I for one support the move to disclose the identity of reviewers as well as the content of their reviews. As we noted in an earlier post, experts facing the prospect of having their opinions critically reviewed by their own peers tend to stay much closer to the truth.
