The Undermining Continues

As we approach the often-underwhelming Peer Review Week, let’s contemplate how our supposed support of peer review is actually shaking out.

• At eLife, peer reviews have no effect on bad science pushed out under their brand.
• Paper mills are making a mockery of peer review while flooding the zone with claims of uncertain merit.
• We have just witnessed the largest retraction event in scholarly and scientific publishing, done in a thoughtless, bulk manner that mocks the idea of careful review on both ends — both pre-publication and post-publication.
• The OA business model continues to show its fundamental flaws — it erodes editorial independence by focusing on quantity over quality, and it privileges authors and funders over editors and reviewers.

Then, there is the almost breathtakingly blatant undermining of peer review — the preprint server. In this age where extremists of all kinds are accommodated and appeased, I doubt those running Peer Review Week will ever come out with a statement condemning this obvious and relentless erosion of peer review as a standard of care in the field.

This accommodation leaves room for endless sophistry about how preprint servers work and why they exist. While there are numerous examples to choose from, this sentence from a feature interviewing Richard Sever of bioRxiv is a palpable example of such sophistry, with the worst of it put in bold type for your convenience: