[thejoneser]

What is the alternative? Channeling Chuchill, peer review is the worst form of journal review except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

As an associate editor and frequent reviewer, I can say with confidence that peer review filters out at least 90% of the garbage that journals receive as submissions. It also provides useful feedback to researchers who cannot otherwise get it. People submit papers knowing they will get rejected because they want to read the referee reports.

In my field, academics simply do not trust a result until it has been replicated and scrutinized by other researchers. If that doesn't happen, it's usually because the result was not interesting enough for anyone to care. If the scrutiny reveals problems, that undermines the credibility of the authors, which is ultimately more important than whether they get the pub.

A final comment: Peer-reviewed journals differ dramatically in their quality. If you don't know what the good journals are, you should expect that your reading will include a bunch of crap that no serious person in the field would pay attention to. Why these crap journals even exist is a mystery to me.

[baseline-shift]

Re 'Why these crap journals even exist is a mystery to me.' Don't journals make money by charging academics to read the whole paper?

[maleldil]

And by charging the authors to publish the paper in the first place. Although I think a lot of the money both ways comes from universities and other organisations that pay for publication costs and have deals with publishers.

Thank god for CS's culture of pre-prints on arXiv.

[thejoneser]

Yes, that's got to be part of the explanation. What's not clear to me is why anyone gets professional credit (e.g., tenure) for publishing in a journal that is obviously bad.