What it was like to be peer reviewed in the 1860s (2017)

> By the 1890s, members of the scientific community began envisioning a referee not as someone who merely made an expert judgment about the quality of a paper, but as someone who had to protect the trustworthiness of the entire scientific literature by detecting bad work.

This is key. Peer review today serves two distinct purposes: to provide feedback for an author to improve their work, and as a stamp of approval that is used in judging the author. However, the latter purpose affects the former, in that a review is no longer just input for the author to consider, but judgment that will impact their career, and whether their work will be made accessible to others in the first place.

(I volunteer for https://plaudit.pub, which aims to provide a separate mechanism to obtain a "stamp of approval", in order to disentangle that step from review and publication. If anyone has contacts at an academic (preprint) publisher who might be open to incorporating it, do get in touch.)

Discussed at the time (of the article of course):

What it was like to be peer reviewed in the 1860s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14305374 - May 2017 (19 comments)

That was the age of the amateur scientist; the future belongs to the amateur, too.

Just as mainstream and social media are net evil influences on society, so by now is the scientific journal system with the enormous reach of its most prestigious publications. Signal is drowned by noise and attempts to garner attention play subtly with the truth and harp upon the fears and desires of the audience.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20210524/studies-mo...