Peer Review is Not Scientific
How a process designed to ensure scientific rigor is tainted by randomness, bias, and arbitrary delays.
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. Academic journal articles are mightily expensive to get access to ($35–55 for a single article, thousands of dollars for an annual subscription), and yet the people who collected the data, analyzed it, wrote it up, submitted it for publication, and revised it receive no compensation no matter how much money is spent accessing their work.
Today, I’d like to set my sights on another troublingly biased and sloppy aspect of the academic publishing process: Peer review. The peer-reviewed process, which is intended to boost the rigor and objectivity of scientific work, is not itself done in an objective, systematic, or scientific way. In fact, it’s one of the most scattershot, inconsistent messes possible.
The process of selecting and assigning reviewers is unsystematic and filled with room for bias and error; review processes themselves are not standardized in any way; the content of reviews is often arbitrary and influenced by personal agendas…
