In practice, "peer review" is almost never actually a peer review, but more like a quick pass-through in which unpaid reviewers who have little free time have no choice but to do as little work as possible, filtering out any work that doesn't make sense to them, perhaps making the odd exception for well-known authors with sterling pedigrees.<p>That's why and how so many fraudulent work passes "peer review," while groundbreaking work by real innovators pursuing unpopular research, like Katalin Karikó[a], have to <i>fight like hell</i> to get funding, to get their work published, to get noticed.<p>I imagine the least-worst solution might be in the form of open arXiv-like repositories for papers + code + data, enabling anyone anywhere to study, debate, and replicate the merits of anyone else's work regardless of pedigree.<p>Every finding is tentative unless it is mathematically proven or successfully replicated.<p>---<p>[a] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3</a>