I was waiting on your reply. Let's get to it shall we?
The first link:
Quote directly from the source:
Scientists give peer review so much authority because they view it as a part of the grand tradition of scientific inquiryan extension, even, of the formal experimental method. Peer evaluation is the endpoint of a cautious progression from theories and predictions to experiments and results. The system dates from the 1700s, when the Royal Society of London set up a "Committee on Papers" with the power to solicit expert opinions. It became the standard for scientific publication only after World War II, when the dramatic expansion of scientific research swamped journal editors and made them look to outsiders for help. Ever since, scientists have claimed that peer review filters out lousy papers, faulty experiments, and irrelevant findings.
The process isn't perfect, as your wonderful link explains by giving the example of the 'power of prayer in healing patients', but it's the best way for academics to publish ground breaking research to their fields. DNA Molecular structure: peer reviewed. AIDS research: peer reviewed Chemotherapy breakthrough: peer reviewed. And I could go on and on and on. But since there are bad things in peer review means the whole thing is discredited, duh. I mean f*** the Catholic church and the good they do because they had some priests who molested children. Yeah!
Second link:
Quoted directly from the source:
The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including Americas National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for uninteresting work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightenedor perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
Most researchers today are handing off the research to greater statistical minds for verification. That were many of the errors occurred in the past: statistics. That's one of the main causes from this article. The problem has been diagnosed and the community is working hard to fix it. Garbage in and garbage out you say? No. Garbage in perhaps, but the process is only getting better at making sure garbage doesn't come out.
Third Link:
Quote from the source:
My sting exposed the seedy underside of subscription-based scholarly publishing, where some journals routinely lower their standards in this case by sending the paper to reviewers they knew would be sympathetic in order to pump up their impact factor and increase subscription revenue. Maybe there are journals out there who do subscription-based publishing right but my experience should serve as a warning to people thinking about submitting their work to Science and other journals like it.
Do you get your news from the National Enquirer? What about Inside Edition? To say that all peer-reviewed journals are the same is such BS, and that's the point of the author that you cited: some journals are only doing it for the money, not the actual science. Guess what? And this is gonna be awesome for you: of those 10,800 CC studies that were done with only 2 that said CC wasn't man-made, 90% of them were published in journals or a considerably high reputation. Ouch, I know.
Fourth Link:
SB: I think there was a time, and Im trying to trace the history when the rights to publish, the copyright, was owned jointly by the authors and the journal. Somehow thats why the journals insist they will not publish your paper unless you sign that copyright over. It is never stated in the invitation, but thats what you sell in order to publish. And everybody works for these journals for nothing. Theres no compensation. Theres nothing. They get everything free. They just have to employ a lot of failed scientists, editors who are just like the people at Homeland Security, little power grabbers in their own sphere.
Yet another link you presented that is not against peer-reviewed journals but against those journals that are trying to make money off the authors. The system is changing, right now, because awareness is being raised about the problem: the journals don't care about quality, only about quantity. Good thing real researchers know the difference in these journals, right? Kinda like you know the difference between the BBC and MTV.
Fifth Link:
Groundbreaking scientific books, like Darwin's Origin of the Species or Newton's Principia were not published in peer-reviewed journals.
No $hit there weren't the mechanisms around for journals at that point.
There are many examples of leading journals like Nature and Science having rejected important research, including research that later won the Nobel prize.
I never said that peer reviewed journals were perfect, only that they are the best way to get the cutting edge idea of academia today. Mistakes happen, and I will never say that the process is completely flawless.
So you are correct in a way: there is garbage in, garbage out on a frequent basis, and it just so happens to occur when I see another post from you.
