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Discussion: Should Academic Peer Review Exist?

Kyle T. · 2025-10-29T02:33:34.754117+00:00

I had an idea for something that might appeal to some academically minded folks. Should scientific journals do peer review? There seems to be near-universal consensus that the way scientific journals perform peer-review is flawed. There are many ideas to fix the system, but it's still considered rather radical to just stop peer review altogether. I am interested in abandoning peer review, but I'm curious to hear some thoughts or other suggestions. I present for your debate, the argument to stop peer review: Peer review doesn't solve any problems. It does not eliminate fraud, bad statistics, plagiarism, and it certainly doesn't stop bad science papers from being published. All of those things currently happen. Other tools might alleviate that, but peer review doesn't. Peer review does very often give papers with all of those problems a stamp of approval of being "peer-reviewed", giving the public the idea that these papers have met a certain scientific standard of rigor. For example, the Lancet published a flawed study in 1998 linking vaccines to causing autism, and did not retract it for 12 years. An unearned appearance of rigor can be dangerous. Most critical analysis of a paper happens after it is published, not before. For a lot of things, this makes sense; if an idea is good or interesting it will attract a lot of attention, and therefore more scrutiny, than an uninteresting one. By one estimate, peer review takes up 100 million hours of time globally. That's a lot of hours for adding such questionable value! So yeah, what's the worst case scenario if we just scrap it? Some food for thought: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review https://www.vox.com/2015/12/7/9865086/peer-review-science-problems https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/14/peer-review-watchdog/