Hi there DIVER DAN...

What a bullet like intellect you have there. Always dazzles us lesser souls, with the enormity of your scientific mastery. You're an asinine, narcissistic little fellow aren't you ? Never prepared to engage in sensible discussion. Yet with protracted antecedents for taunting and deriding others from afar, before making good your exit by scurring away for cover once more !

Yeah, I suppose publication in PNAS would would seem like ridicule for those of us that have published in Science, wouldn't it Raycom?

Yep, peer review has proved very good at protecting the not too bright from having to absorb & evaluate new facts, & ideas.

Keeps the incompetent in jobs as well. Hopefully so they can retire & draw their pension, before anyone finds out what charlatans so many are.

Stomach ulcers anyone?

The first step to cleaing up peer review is to get rid of the anonymity of the reviewers. A classic example of how anonymity can taint the process is the Steig episode when Eric Steig, author of a discredited paper on alleged Antarctic warming, was an anonymous reviewer of the O'Donnell paper which critiqued Steig's paper:

http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/13/steig-and-the-knuckleheaded-reviewers/

That simply should not have happened; if full transparency was the standard then even if Steig did review the paper his 'interest' would have beeen known.

Still, regardless of any level of openess, the system which allows Lewandowsky's egregious 'survey' paper to be published needs major revision.

Oh please, getting rid of anonymous review is the worst idea for 'cleaning up' the system. The situation you describe is an editorial problem, not an anonymous review problem. The reviewers are never anonymous from the editor and they should have known any conflicts of interest before sending a piece out to review.

Getting rid of anonymity is a recipe for disaster. Can you image what would happen if you severely reviewed someones work that happens to have your grant application in front of them for their review? Or perhaps gets it next year? Scientists aren't supposed to be spiteful humans, but reasoning logical automatons aren't they?

Yeah, there's heaps of stories about how people couldn't get their stuff published etc. Actually what they really mean is that they couldn't get their stuff published in their journal of choice. Too bad, so sad. Getting stuff published, even with peer review, is actually quite easy.

Getting stuff published in Nature...not so easy.

I think the point Don is making is that we need to be cautious. The fact that some point of view is presented in peer review journals is a weak test of its ability to withstand criticism. And if it is rejected, the reasons for its rejection may have little to do with the worth of the research.

But what alternatives do we have? Perhaps, instead of peer review some journals should have non-peer review i.e review by scientists who who do not have an established position to defend.