LGBT shuts down science

[RoadRunner79]

There are a number of issues with peer review which have come to light in the last few years.   It's about as political as the grammy's.   There is also the repeatability problem which they are finding.  It will be curious to see if they find a flaw in the methodology or if the come up with some fluff, because the conclusion isn't PC enough for them.

It's still better than not having any peer review. As Aoi Magi points out, peer review is a continual process. It happens before a paper gets published, and this is a very useful step. But once it is published, it's opened up to a much wider audience of scientists who can then look for evidence for and against and come up with competing hypotheses and explanations. This is also a form of peer review.

Just because two or three scientists have read a paper and accepted it doesn't mean that the paper is also accepted by the wider scientific community. As for politics, you get it every where. But if the methodology is correct then most will accept a paper for publication even if they do not agree with it because they are also aware that they might be wrong and the scientific community needs all the evidence to analyse.

Problems with repeatability are not due to the scientific method but economic considerations. Scientists are judged according to metrics and this translates to how well they are funded. For example if you try to reproduce some results and find that you cannot, the more prestigious journals like Nature won't be so keen to publish them as novel research because they are looking to increase their sales. The study can be still get published elsewhere but because scientists are judged by the impact factor of where they publish this hurts their funding. So there is less incentive to reproduce other people's work to check that it is correct.

So then, most of the peer review happens outside of and really apart from the publishing process.  I would agree to that.  My disagreement is mostly when people over-emphasize only the publishing part of the process as the be all, end all.  I do believe that it could be better, if it was more transparent, and we could know why it was rejected.

  It's understandable that a journal can pick what it wishes to publish, but it may not always be for problems with the research as you point out.  It seems that some are skipping the publishing process all together, and sharing their information in more open platforms to begin with or along with submitting it to a journal.  It's faster, cheaper, and less red tape to get to the wider audience for evaluation.   I think that you are going to see more of this in the future.   The politics and push to publish, I think is leading to cheap science, and hurtful to the field.