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Anonymity removes the difficult aspects of human social interaction and allows everyone to focus on the science.

Peer review itself is wonderful and is what enables science itself to work as well as it does.




Frankly "peer review" is the furthest thing away from wonderful. While the idea is legitimate, it is undermined at every step of the way.

* Reviewers are basically forced to it for free. If you're a researcher you won't have the time to properly fact check a 40 page paper for free, it just isn't going to happen. So they (we) don't. The review process isn't very rigorous.

* Journals are leeching off of the public money by double whammying both the scientists and the institutes while providing minuscule value. Their gains are absolutely disproportionate to what they provide.

* Even the most involved and convoluted peer review processes aren't as anonymous as you think. When there's already a handful of people in your field, you can pretty easily tell someone's identity from their writing style.

I would love to pretend that the system is great and works very well but it just doesn't and this pretense and the phenomenon of holding new systems to a higher standard than the current one is preventing us from actually improving the system.




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