zlacker

I don't mean so say that criticisms aren't valid; just that perfect is frustratingly often the enemy of better.

For example, the status quo can be justified by "it seems obvious that" rather than being evidence-based. In practice, single or double blind is very often not actually blind [1], in which case it's hard to argue that it would be any different than transparency. Likewise, a new solution "creates all kinds of conflicts of interests and biases", without even considering whether the existing CoIs and biases are any better. Likewise, if people who game the system today have a low reputation, why would the same not hold true in a new system? Likewise, does anonymous peer review actually improve the quality of the reviews (e.g. [2])?

It's good not to blindly embrace something new, but I think it's important to withold judgement too, and see how it plays out in practice, and to make an effort to compensate for the prejudice people typically have towards the status quo.

And yes, absolutely agreed that much more needs to be addressed to improve science. But I also very much take issue with the idea that peer review is fine as-is.

[1] https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2017/10/31/the-fractured-lo...

[2] Heading "quality of feedback": https://plos.org/resource/open-peer-review/

>>Vinnl+(OP)
The point is that there is nothing inherently wrong with blind peer review, you're proposing the classical solution to a nonexistent problem. The problem is that too many reputable journals were lured over to big publishing houses and these want to use them as a perpetual money-printing machine. To fix the problem, you create free, voluntary-based reputable open access journals with triple blind peer review that will (slowly) replace the expensive ones. This is happening.

Maybe you should consider that you're the stubborn one who links to blog posts from open access journals with a strong bias to reform the peer review system as evidence. Plos journals have this agenda because they don't have good enough pools of reviewers, which is the problem of all new journals. However, it's not as if scientists all over the world and funding authorities haven't thought about the topic. People should not withold judgement about these issues, that's an odd request and would weaken the position of scientific staff towards political decision makers who certainly won't withold judgement.

To give you an example of what is being done by funding authorities, at our university we are required by law to publish every article in openly accessible format. Otherwise they do not count at all towards our salaries, they will be ignored completely. There are public open repositories for that. The only thing that bothers everyone is that big publishers like Elsevier only allow draft versions in those repositories and there is sometimes a 1 year mandatory delay until they can be put online. That needs to change and EU authorities are working on it.