Peer Review is Not Scientific

How a process designed to ensure scientific rigor is tainted by randomness, bias, and arbitrary delays.

A mess of papers. Image by Christa Dodoo, edited by author in Pixlr.

In my last essay, I discussed the ways in which the academic publishing process is unnecessarily slow, labor-intensive, and exploitative of researchers who are not paid for the research and writing they devote years of their lives to…