Peer review is the problem, not the answer. It's how you lock in fraud, not how you correct errors. The whole process of science is required to determine the truth of science, not the authority of publishing. Authority produces fraud; evaluation corrects errors.

Part of the problem is the assumption that truth is decreed by authority rather than something that evolves through rationality. Authority is not compatible with truth. Why Truth

There is a natural inclination to review and criticize any document before it is published. Everything from fiction to news is handled that way. And it is censorship which restricts all forms of publishing to fit in some type of box. In industry, the owner has a right to do that. But there is no owner for science. Its product is supposed to be an evolving truth which does not fit into a subjective box. Therefore, the reviewing should be limited to suggestions, not a shaping and controlling process. After the suggestions, let scientists include their errors with their worth, particularly since there is seldom agreement as to what is error and what is worth in science.

Scientists are so intimidated that they cannot oppose official corruptions in science. One of the main causes is peer review.

If peer review were open and accountable, there might be a small chance of correcting some of the corruptions through truth and criticism; but the process is cloaked in the darkness of anonymity.

There is no place for secrecy in science after the research is done. A laboratory needs some protection from interference while it is working through the challenges, but the evaluation process cannot produce truth through secrecy and unaccountability.

You might assume that there are no official errors in science. Due to the exploitive and corrupt process, nearly everything in science has official errors within it. There is nothing in science entirely free from errors, while a culture of protecting and exploiting the errors creates an official reality which cannot be opposed.

Relativity was the most obvious and extreme example. It was imposed upon physicists, and none were allowed to dissent, as explained on other pages.

A recent parallel in biology is prion proteins as the supposed cause of Scrapies-like diseases. But unlike physics, the evidence in biology is far more available and less abstract. So prions are a much more open defiance of principles and standards. Prion promoters say or imply that the laws of natural selection can be contradicted on the basis of their junk science research.

Debunkers of corruption say no one conspires such things. So an explanation of how it works is necessary.

The first fact involved is that science research is extremely demanding, because the unknown does not easily yield information to technological gimmickry. The second most significant fact is that there is an extreme deficiency of abstract understanding among the world's elites including scientists. They do stupid things and make stupid statements which conflict with everything they are suppose to know on the subject.

They react by demanding that no one question their errors. That demand becomes a rule for power elites in all areas. Scratch each others backs and never oppose the group, or the result is to get shoved out.

In science the result is that errors keep getting compounded, while a pretense of normalcy is maintained. Scientists talk around obvious corruptions, as if they could not see an elephant in a bathtub.

Ultimately, there has to be external accountability for corruptions. In science, the public needs to be creating accountability through criticism.

There is a general assumption that peer review improves publications. Supposedly, deficiencies are corrected, and wording is clarified. It's a pipe dream. Purifying is how complex results are destroyed. It's like redesigning an elm tree or improving the Edsil. It isn't an elm tree or Edsil afterwards.

The mentality seems to be developed when students are writing term papers. They quote publications as being fact. So science publications are supposedly quotable fact. They never are. The pretense of fact destroys the process of evolving knowledge.

Having two or three experts modify someone else's work assumes that research should be perfected before being presented to everyone else. So the rest of the scientists have two or three persons doing their evaluating for them. Scientists are all supposed to be capable of doing their own evaluating. Scientists need to see the deficiencies as well as the value in research.

Because of these forces, there has been a devolution of science publications from a complete description with specifics to something resembling a news article or propaganda sheet. The specifics and details are gone, and all one sees is rehashed opinions.

There is no constructive form that peer review could take. Science publications should use their professional staff, which they already have, to evaluate basic standards only. All of the rest of the limitations need to be visible to everyone.

Addendum

In the arguments over global warming, some persons, such as Monbiot, take the position that if it is not peer reviewed science, it is not relevant to the subject. Since the IPCC supposedly represents the peer reviewed science, no one can question the IPCC conclusion that humans are causing global warming.

Monbiot's claim that if it is not peer reviewed, it is not science, is an arbitrary and useless way to define science, because science has not addressed many of the questions that people need to address in life. Science cannot prove that water is wet (or anything else), yet people need to know that it is. And science has become at least as corrupt as any power structure in society, which means everything about it needs to be criticized.

To eliminate external criticism of science by pretending that peer review purifies science is about the functional equivalent of preventing anyone from questioning Hitler's power. Nothing is supposed to be above external criticism; and the tendency of the public to not criticize science is one of the main reasons why it has become so corrupt.

Then, no one with half a brain would define science in terms of peer review. Science is a method of proceeding and a standard which shows evidence for basic questions. Peer review is nothing but an extremely questionable method of publishing. Science needs to be criticized through rationality based on objective reality by nonscientists as well as scientists. To replace rationality with peer review is an extremely debased method of railroading fraud onto society.

Perhaps the ultimate, most basic, reason why the claim of peer review is a fraud is because no one can completely represent someone else's reality, and certainly not ill informed persons. It's like the pope determining morality for everyone else. How do you ask the pope if it is moral to cut trees for an oil well, or anything else in question? The persons who shout peer review can't spell the word science, and yet they speak for peer reviewed scientists.