There have been several instances where commentators at this blog have criticised others for publishing their information on websites rather in peer reviewed journals. The inference being that if its not in a peer reviewed journal, the idea has little merit.
Interestingly, there's a new medical journal to be published by Elsevier called 'Medical Hypotheses' and it plans to take a deliberately different approach to peer review:
"Most contemporary practice tends to discriminate against radical ideas that conflict with current theory and practice. Medical Hypotheses will publish radical ideas, so long as they are coherent and clearly expressed. Furthermore, traditional peer review can oblige authors to distort their true views to satisfy referees, and so diminish authorial responsibility and accountability. In Medical Hypotheses, the authors' responsibility for the integrity, precision and accuracy of their work is paramount. The editor sees his role as a 'chooser', not a 'changer': choosing to publish what are judged to be the best papers from those submitted.
Papers in Medical Hypotheses take a standard scientific form in terms of style, structure and referencing. The journal therefore constitutes a bridge between cutting-edge theory and the mainstream of medical and scientific communication, which ideas must eventually enter if they are to be critiqued and tested against observations."
What a great idea! And doesn't the new journal neatly articulate the problems with peer review for those working outside of established paradigms.
The quote was sent to me with a link to a blog piece by Andrew Leigh in which he suggests the concept has application to economics.
Single author papers are becomming rarer these days so this should reduce the risk of serious corruption as does multiple reviewers. The question these days is do scientists have enough time to devote to quality reviewing? Good and bad papers are usually fairly straight forward decisions, but in between papers can require quite a many days of research and reading, a luxury few can afford these days. It seems now that if you want to publish in a certain journal the editors have you in their sights as a reviewer.
Well if the system was more open from the beginning then Rosalind Franklin et al, may not have felt as though the were dudded.
Or alternatively if Franklin and Pauling had been the secret reviewers then .... fill in your own scenario.
According to the book "Science: A History" by John Gribbin, Watson and Crick owe much of their success to their being able to view the excellent x-ray crystallography photographic results of one Rosalind Franklin. They were able to view these results without the knowledge of Franklin, without her permission, and downplayed the significance of this in their published work.
Gribbin goes as far to suggest that this was 'a serious breach of etiquette', that Franklin had been working on a similar paper to the Watson Crick one, and that Watson and Crick to some degree snatched the credit for the discovery of the structure of DNA from under Franklin's nose.
In any case, Gribbin is quick to point out in this example, and in many other examples in the book that science proceeds by evolution not revolution, that new theories are generally the result of a build up of knowledge from contributions from many people despite the attachment of names and people to famous ideas. That is, scientific consensus is the approval process by which models and hypotheses become theories, rather than human knowledge abruptly changing overnight because an individual paper is published, regardless of whether it was peer reviewed or not.
I wasn't aware that the Watson & Crick paper was not peer reviewed, Perhaps the lack of peer review meant that there was no reviewer to question closely what resources were used to find the result. Maybe appropriate recognition may have then been given to Frankin, Pauling and a bunch of others that all contributed greatly to the discovery of the structure of DNA.