Peer review grew up in a world where there were many fewer people engaging in science than today. Typically an editor would know everyone in the world who had contributed to the field in the past, and would have enough time to understand the ideas of each new entrant to the field as they started to submit papers. It relied on personal connections and deep and thoughtful understanding.
That has changed just due to the scale of the scientific endeavor today, and is no longer possible in that form.
I don't know how you fix that. But it points to why peer review worked well at one time and became some kind of gold standard and why it's failing to be some kind of gold standard today.
I think you have to parse what was going right about the system that created peer review in order to have any hope of parsing how to replace it at scale for a world that's grown vastly larger in terms of sheer population numbers.
Peer review grew up in a world where there were many fewer people engaging in science than today. Typically an editor would know everyone in the world who had contributed to the field in the past, and would have enough time to understand the ideas of each new entrant to the field as they started to submit papers. It relied on personal connections and deep and thoughtful understanding.
That has changed just due to the scale of the scientific endeavor today, and is no longer possible in that form.
I don't know how you fix that. But it points to why peer review worked well at one time and became some kind of gold standard and why it's failing to be some kind of gold standard today.
I think you have to parse what was going right about the system that created peer review in order to have any hope of parsing how to replace it at scale for a world that's grown vastly larger in terms of sheer population numbers.