Quote:
Originally Posted by Retrograde
Huh? Peer review a foundation of modern scientific discovery and has worked well since the 18th century.
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Peer Review by external reviewers is something that has only become extremely common since the mid 20th Century. Before that, Editors of Journals made the decision of what papers to publish, not the peer reviewers.
Problems arise when there is a perception of a cabal in the peer review process.
From Wikipedia,
"
Peer review has long been a touchstone of the scientific method, but it is only since the middle of the 20th century that it has been systematically entrusted to external reviewers. In earlier periods, editors of scientific journals often made publication decisions without seeking outside input. For example, Albert Einstein's revolutionary Annus Mirabilis papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were peer-reviewed by the journal's editor-in-chief, Max Planck, and its co-editor, Wilhelm Wien, both future Nobel prize winners and together experts on the topics of these papers. An external panel of reviewers was not sought, as is done for many scientific journals today. Established authors and editors were given more latitude in their journalistic discretion. An editorial in Nature published in 2003 stated that "in journals in those days, the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas."
