Ray don’t hitch you wagon to peer reviewing. Many scientist question it.

WHAT IS PEER REVIEW?
My point is that peer review is impossible to define in operational terms (an operational definition is one whereby if 50 of us looked at the same process we could all agree most of the time whether or not it was peer review). Peer review is thus like poetry, love, or justice. But it is something to do with a grant application or a paper being scrutinized by a third party—who is neither the author nor the person making a judgement on whether a grant should be given or a paper published. But who is a peer? Somebody doing exactly the same kind of research (in which case he or she is probably a direct competitor)? Somebody in the same discipline? Somebody who is an expert on methodology? And what is review? Somebody saying `The paper looks all right to me', which is sadly what peer review sometimes seems to be. Or somebody pouring all over the paper, asking for raw data, repeating analyses, checking all the references, and making detailed suggestions for improvement? Such a review is vanishingly rare.

What is clear is that the forms of peer review are protean. Probably the systems of every journal and every grant giving body are different in at least some detail; and some systems are very different. There may even be some journals using the following classic system. The editor looks at the title of the paper and sends it to two friends whom the editor thinks know something about the subject. If both advise publication the editor sends it to the printers. If both advise against publication the editor rejects the paper. If the reviewers disagree the editor sends it to a third reviewer and does whatever he or she advises. This pastiche—which is not far from systems I have seen used—is little better than tossing a coin, because the level of agreement between reviewers on whether a paper should be published is little better than you'd expect by chance.1

That is why Robbie Fox, the great 20th century editor of the Lancet, who was no admirer of peer review, wondered whether anybody would notice if he were to swap the piles marked `publish' and `reject'. He also joked that the Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. When I was editor of the BMJ I was challenged by two of the cleverest researchers in Britain to publish an issue of the journal comprised only of papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. I wrote back `How do you know I haven't already done it?'

THE DEFECTS OF PEER REVIEW
So we have little evidence on the effectiveness of peer review, but we have considerable evidence on its defects. In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused.

R.I.P. DJ Hardline -- Gone Way Too Soon

GKAS Member 54

Wouldn't an open mind be going with the vast majority of research, rather than refusing a statement based on the objection of a minority of research (until such time as proven otherwise). Kind of like Occum's Razor if you will (you start with the probable, and eliminate based on evidence).

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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I neither completely accept or reject man made global warming. I acknowledge the weight of opinion but also understand the limitations of the scientific process.

There is a case for reducing industrial emissions on the basis that it might be a cause of warming but in practice, the entire world has to do the same. That is unlikely. There will be a lag as developing countries catch up.
Irrespective, there are clear advantages to developing cleaner, cheaper energy but the predicted future demands of the planet mean that no energy source is currently available (that is public domain) that can meet that demand.
The biggest factor is growing demand caused by rapidly increasing population. The human population must get smaller or we are doomed. The question is whether that will happen before our use of resources and production of waste products cause the collapse of civilisation.
The reality might be that in the absence of new energy sources, the collapse will be the short term solution. .