Here it comes:
link 1: The Limits and Power of Peer Review
This link is address a legitimate concern, however the concern is with fraudulent individuals submitting data, and a shortcoming in being able to ferret this out. It is NOT addressing any fraud or wrongdoing in the peer review process, or that this process lacks credibility. It is merely discussing limitations of it.
In a group that consists of millions of people worldwide regardless of what that group is it is inevitable that there would be a few that would be dishonest and potentially be fraudulent, this is not a condemnation or an issue with science or with peer review, it is an issue with basic human nature.
further down after the 2 examples there is this:
this indicates that while there is always room to discuss the limitations and how to overcome them, there is one thing that is integral here, people that have extensive familiarity with the subject (and in this case the individuals work even) are essential to perform this duty.
You have been asked this by several people here, what would you have in its place? How could we expect someone not familiar with the subject material to ferret the inevitable few fraudsters when extensive familiarity would be required. Geez the experts can't accomplish this.. lets send in the amateurs (who will take up this task?). Or shall we have scientific anarchy? That sounds fun, albeit disastrous.
This is not anything related to the argument or the stance regarding peer review you are putting up here. It does not show that the peer review process is fraudulent, it does not show that the peer review process is dishonest, or to be mistrusted, it shows that some INDIVIDUALS can be dishonest -- stop the presses this is shocking I tell ya..
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ok next - your blog link :roll:
link 2: Has the peer review process lost credibility? | Sandy Starr | Independent Battle of Ideas Blogs
I am going to leave your source alone despite the bullseye painted on it, instead I will discuss the 4 things he in turn sources for evidence.
link 2a: "Andrew Wakefield’s influential 1998 paper suggesting a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine is fully retracted by the journal that originally published it."
Retraction
This is what they are supposed to do, not a damnation of peer review at all. They learn the paper is flawed, they retract it.
link 2b: "Thousands of leaked emails appear to show climate scientists colluding to suppress the publication of research."
Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review | Fred Pearce | Environment | The Guardian
the climate gate email, this is discussed all over the place in other threads and other topics, and that article is frankly way too long to go through in its entirety. I will touch on one thing that jumped at me before i decided it was tl;dr for a rehash of old news, their first example:
So the primary and initial example in this link is based on.. drum roll please.. pure supposition.
link 2c: "14 eminent stem cell biologists complain that an obstructive clique has been blocking the publication of research."
Open letter to Senior Editors of peer-review journals publishing in the field of stem cell biology | Europe's stem cell hub | EuroStemCell
I read the letter, I cannot see how it supports the claim your blog author made above. Its an open letter suggesting a way to increase transparency, nothing wrong here. But I don;t know if anyone is reading this wall of text read it yourself and tell me if I am missing something.
link 2d: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is taken to task for predicating its Fourth Assessment Report on ‘grey literature’."
Debate heats up over IPCC melting glaciers claim - environment - 08 January 2010 - New Scientist
hmm...
we have discussed the IPCC quite enough already they have nothing to do with academic peer review.
link 2e: "A computer-generated hoax paper from the ‘Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology’ (CRAP) is accepted for publication in the Open Information Science Journal."
I looked in a few places to see what this open journal is.
First preliminary search, was wikipedia of it at all, so its not a major credible journal:
List of scientific journals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Then I searched ERIC (Educational Resources Information center) for both Open Information Science Journal, and for its acronym name of TOISJ. not a mention of it there either, so now we discover that it is at best a rather minor journal, and also the fact that it is not listed here is an indicator that it is not very reputable.
So I tried to search the Directory of Open Journals to try to find it, this one is much more narrow in scope since it was an open journal (this is a bit of a warning flag in and of itself). I came up empty here as well.
What does this tell us? This is some small two bit journal (which anyone can start and run) that does not pop anywhere when searching for it - not even in a directory dedicated to open journals, hardly a reason for anything it does to be a damnation of peer review.
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ok, that is the first two of your three links, I am tired of typing, I may or may not come back to the third, but in short it is very similar to the first, examining limitations and suggesting means of improving the process (such as the number of submissions swamping the publications). This is a good thing, self evaluation and suggesting how to improve the process is good, stagnation gets us nowhere, and there is always room for improvement, especially in a world where the way we share and transfer data has accelerated greatly, and the advances of science and the amount of papers as a result has followed suit.
This link is not the damnation of the process you were wanting to hoist this off as either. if anyone else is so compelled I will leave it to them to address this in more detail, I am tired, and I know that this is basically a wasted effort.
You are going to disregard everything I wrote and attempt to dismiss it with a few pithy comments from your limited playbook, but it is there for everyone else to read and to judge for themselves