Peer review has the flaw that it is done relatively in secret and by a small, hand-picked number of reviewers: the wider community never sees the result until it has passed peer review. The same result – that is, a filtering of truth from error – could be achieved without this secretive method, and the secrecy of the method and the small number of reviewers introduces a vulnerability to capture which does not exist otherwise.

Wikipedia is of course vulnerable to capture and has been captured, but a group of blogs that link to each other and to hostile blogs provide an alternative that is invulnerable to capture.

This alternative, however, requires significant work by the reader – you have to read and understand some critiques, and determine for yourself who is blowing smoke. Thereafter, you can trust some blogs and not others. This alternative fails to supply an authority that others can rely upon without significant work.

Peer review is not a necessary part of science. Science involves criticism, science filters truth from error by criticism and replication, but this does not have to be done by the mechanism of peer review. Peer review has the flaw that it is done relatively in secret and by a small, hand-picked number of reviewers: the wider community never sees the result until it has passed peer review. The same result – that is, a filtering of truth from error – could be achieved without this secretive method, and the secrecy of the method and the small number of reviewers introduces a vulnerability to capture which does not exist otherwise.

I don’t think peer review exists in order that science can be captured; I think its corruptibility is an accident. My tentative guess is that peer review exists to make a rapid decision about the quality of a work. A journal does not want to publish bad research but neither does it want to publish very old research (which has had enough time to be critiqued), nor does it want to publish already widely-known research (which research necessarily is if it is thoroughly critiqued), and so a journal will subject a paper to a preliminary review process – peer review. This is needed by journals for reasons specific to journals. It is not needed by science. And so the facile equation of peer review with scientific credibility that some make is false.

Additionally most of the papers published by journals are too trivial for anyone to want to read them unless they are assigned that as a task. In this role, journal publication a kind of vanity publication – publication for the sake of the author, not for the sake of the readers. Not to boost the author’s ego, but to pad his resume.