[CraigS]

Ok, so we've brought this topic up in many threads recently, but we've never tackled it on its own (hence the new thread).

Here we go .. an article published yesterday (Sept 9, 2010) in Physicsworld.com:
"Peer review highly sensitive to poor refereeing, claim researchers"

Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science.
...
The researchers created a model of a generic specialist field where referees, selected at random, can fall into one of five categories. There are the "correct" who accept the good papers and reject the bad. There are the "altruists" and the "misanthropists", who accept or reject all papers respectively. Then there are the "rational", who reject papers that might draw attention away from their own work. And finally, there are the "random" who are not qualified to judge the quality of a paper because of incompetence or lack of time.

So, what type are you ???

And just to balance things up and offer some constructive suggestions ..

When asked by physicsworld.com to offer an alternative to the current peer-review system, Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a "market for scientific work". He envisages a situation where journal editors and their "scouts" search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. The best papers, he believes, would naturally be picked up by a number of editors leaving it up to authors to choose their journal. "Papers that no-one wants to publish remain on the server and are open to everyone – but without the 'prestigious' quality stamp of a journal," Thurner explains.

So there you go .. there are scientists working on improving the system and thereby its quality goals. (As expected .. unless you're a pseudoscientist, I suppose).



Cheers
PS: Not that there's anything wrong with being a pseudoscientist.