>>11370132Anyone that defends peer review either has never published anything, never reviewed anything, or has a famous supervisor that gets published for biases unknown to them/ College renown, etc.
The way to improve peer review is easy, actually.
1 - Make it double blind in 100% of cases, no excuses. Most journals are single blind only, and this easily lets reviewers be biased towards institutions or researchers they like/dislike for whatever reason.
2 - Massively reduce publication fees in open access journals and the likes. Publishing a paper does not cost 1000~4000 US dollars. IT DOES FUCKING NOT. Scientific journals shouldn't be a fucking profitable business that leeches on university grants anyway, and if they are, paper authors should get paid for their contributions. This would force journals to actually peer review shit and not just accept shitty papers for APC purposes.
3 - Make peer review happen at the proposal stage of the paper. You submit your proposal, clearly delineated, and if your methodology is sound your paper gets published, positive or negative results. No excuses. If the methodology is sound and the efforts are focused on that, you can later on let the public decide what has impact or not.
Whether this fixes the thing fully or not is irrelevant, because it would already improve the current landscape by 99%.
