Somebody back then had the bright idea that, if peer reviewers were anonymous and free from accountability, they would be more candid and more truthful. For about five decades, ...NSF, NASA and other agencies have been doing what no foreign adversary or terrorist organization has been able to do: They have been slowly and imperceptibly undermining American science, driving America toward third-world status in science. Secret, unaccountable reviews - frequently by one's competitors - give unfair advantage to reviewers who would falsely berate a competitor's proposal for research funds... The system has been to open to corruption for decades, and remains open to further corruption... There is a far, far more devastating consequence of secret, unaccountable reviews: Out of fear of being "denounced" in secret reviews, many scientists have become pale-gray, defensive, adopting only the consensus-approved viewpoint and refraining from discussing anything that might be considered a challenge to other's work or to the funding agency's programs. Political correctness is the order. -- Alvarez by Luis Alvarez (page 184)
I must reiterate my feeling that experimentalists always welcome the suggestions of the theorists. But the present situation is ridiculous... In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster to be visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me that he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because my track record was good. I believe U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing if we returned to the tried-and-true method of evaluating experimenters rather than experimental proposals. Many people will say that my ideas are elitist, and I certainly agree. The alternative is the egalitarianism that we now practice and that I've seen nearly kill basic science in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China. -- ibid (pp 200-201)
The Alvarez family certainly learned about academic orthodoxy when the tried to convince the world of their boloid impact theory for the death of the dinosaurs. I am glad to see that a few scientists are actually beginning to ignore the orthodoxy that has restricted archeological quests to areas mostly above sea level. With water as low as 400 feet below current sea levels in the past 18,000 years, there is so much potential for exploration.
BTTT
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So what can be done about scientific publishing? The only service the publishers provide is to arrange for reviews and to print the journals. And for this they charge an exorbitant fee, a racket George Monbiot rightly calls "pure rentier capitalism".There is an alternative: publish your paper yourself on the web and open the comments. This sort of post-publication review would reduce costs enormously, and the results would be open for anyone to read without paying. It would also destroy the hegemony of half a dozen high-status journals. Everyone wants to publish in Nature, because it's seen as a passport to promotion and funding. The Nature Publishing Group has cashed in by starting dozens of other journals with Nature in the title.
The chicanery is not limited to "climate change" but is pervasive in most if not all fields of study. Fudging the data is not the sole purview of algore and his fellow travelers.