An interesting editorial in The Guardian this weekend on the common practice of peer review in science and the end that seems to be near. The newspaper mentions 2 recent episodes with Nature that had to retract two papers it published in January after mistakes were spotted in the figures, some of the methods descriptions were found to be plagiarised and early attempts to replicate the work failed and BMJ that was plunged into a public row over two papers it published last year questioning the benefits of prescribing statins and suggesting that the side effects could outweigh the health advantages.

The Guardian states:

“Nature and the BMJ, like all serious scientific journals, rely on peer review to establish the authority of the papers they publish, and peer review, it appears, is less reliable than it sounds. Some journals rely on too narrow a group of reviewers who are all too human. In highly specialised fields, self-interest may influence their review. Peer review anyway has limits. Reviewers are not expected to check the raw data, only the way it has been used. And then there is the conspiracy of hope. It is only human to want there to be, say, a way of stimulating ordinary cells so that they behave like stem cells (the research Nature has had to retract).”

What do you think? Is the end really near? What about online pre-reviews? Or just more in dept pre-publication reviewing focused on the technical side of the research?