This is an interesting tale and I'm grateful to Don Aitkin for publishing it. However I'm not sure why it indicates the failure of peer review.

Firstly, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that peer review is infallible. It is beyond human capability to devise an infallible system. The greatest problem with peer review is the opposite of what appears here. It's not that it keeps out the good stuff so much as that it lets through too much dross. A distressingly high proportion of scientific papers sink without a trace.

Secondly, peer reviewers at different journals have differing opinions. That's why we generally talk about the peer review SYSTEM, not peer review at individual journals.

In this case one of the five most prestigious general scientific journals in the English-speaking world published their highly controversial paper. PNAS isn't exactly the Timbuctou Journal of Science.

This doesn't sound like a failure of the peer review SYSTEM. It sounds like a success.

Precisely Steven, well said.

Unfortunately, your opening post will not be heard by those hearing the baited dog-whistle embedded within the article.

He says

"the world of peer review is governed by widespread assumptions about how things actually work, assumptions that aren't always correct. I've made this point before about climate change"

(linked to http://donaitkin.com/on-excellence-in-research/ )

In fact the only thing he says there about climate science is

"But my feeling is ..., so that we are now getting far too much ‘policy-based evidence-making’ especially in climate science.

In short, nothing about peer-review, and nothing about climate science that is supported by any particulars whatever.

Oddly, the other link in the same sentence of Don's article points to something else Don has written, at

http://donaitkin.com/two-cheers-for-peer-review/

which does have more to say about climate science. But it suffers from a complete absence of particulars which might lead one to believe that either (1) Don knows any climate science or (2) it's difficult to get good papers opposing the climate science orthodoxy published (he asserts this, but that's all).

The other posters made fair points but I think the point that Atkin is making is that this was a key paper pointing to a major, if not enormous problems with accepted models for drug testing, and there was a lot of trouble getting it accepted. Further, the problem was that the reviewers, who would have been prominent scientists, rejected the paper even though they could not find any error with it.

The conclusions were just too fantastic for them to accept. This remains a major problem for anyone who challenges the orthodoxy.

The paper should have gone in Nature.

I think the researchers pique at being rejected by Science and Nature is a bit much for a press release.

This story is not about the 'failure' of peer review, as they actually got published in a fairly prestigious journal and will get cited, but rather the perceived 'snobbery' of the most prestigious journals.

I don't think that Don realises how difficult it is to get things published in these journals. They don't care if you are 'right'. The fact that 13,000 papers (i.e. 13,000+ authors and research groups) are submitted to them each year that think that their research is good enough to publish, means that many of them are 'right', and the journal knows it. What they are looking for is significance, is it a 'breakthrough' that will change the field? This is much more difficult to convey in a paper that is only 1500 words long.

I know for a fact that these journals have published what were thought to be hugely significant findings that turned out to be, not quite incorrect, but artefacts caused by the analyses. However, the publication of them was not 'wrong', as it sparked much more research in that direction and more understanding of the field in general.

I would like to know if Don thinks that peer review fails more because it lets 'wrong' things be published, or fails because it doesn't publish things that are 'right'?

But I know one thing, he likely hasn't even attempted to publish in Science or Nature.

I knew I'd come across this before.

So I googled the two sites where I may have come across it - and:

http://joannenova.com.au/2013/02/peer-review-failure-science-and-nature-journals-reject-papers-because-they-have-to-be-wrong/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/11/settled-science-updateof-mice-and-men/

Like Steven said, it's a system, and it seems the "skeptic" sites are indulging in a "cherry-pick"(again).