"Peer review is the worst method of safeguarding scientific integrity, except for all those other methods that have been tried from time to time." As Churchill might have said if he'd been a scientist rather than a politician.

From a conversation with a friend: https://theconversation.com/peer-review-is-meant-to-prevent-scientific-misconduct-but-it-has-its-own-problems-248015

There are a lot of flaws in #peerreview as it's generally done now, and people working to improve it. But what's the alternative to the concept itself? We know what general public #commentary on #science looks like, and politicians shoehorning science into their #ideologies, and science for #profit without checks on validity ... they're all awful.

None of them can be completely avoided either, any more than the potent combination of authoritarianism and stupidity which is always trying to infect #democratic forms of #government. (Just to choose a random example.) And in fact there *should* be input into science from outside the field, because it doesn't exist in a vacuum any more than defense or education or business or religion or any other large-scale area of human endeavour.

But if there's a better way to keep science more or less on track, I'll be damned if I know what it is. The only people qualified to judge the work of scientists—not the big-picture priorities, and not the utility of the results, but the nitty-gritty of the work itself—are other people knowledgeable in the same line of work, and I don't see that changing. Same as any other job, really.

Like I said above, there are proposals for addressing peer review's flaws, and I'll be happy to expound on that if anyone likes.