How to fix peer review

Re: "How to fix peer review."¹ Your solution would certainly change the system, although I wonder if it might not exacerbate the existence of "camps" or "cliques" within each discipline. All one would need to do is get like-minded reviewers and then find a like-minded review editor at a journal.

Michael Crichton suggested in State of Fear that two or three environmental research grants should be given to separate research groups to examine the same thing simultaneously – hopefully without each lab knowing the others involved – and then comparing the results from the labs.² It's a different problem, I think, but same goal of improving the information quality available to policymakers and public.

***

Peer review is not perfect, but it has been designed to blindly assess the scientific merit of submitted manuscripts. The idea is sound, and it is still working in a majority of journals....