A thought provoking post. Regarding peer reviewed science, I can offer the perspective that anonymous peer review is quite often not nice at all. But, having said that, unless a paper is extremely poor, adversarial reviews are rarely needed. A good critical constructive review can point out severe problems without raising the hackles of the author(s) unnecessarily and is more likely to get them dealt with properly than an overly adversarial review. This works so long as the process is private, the reviewer is truly anonymous, and the reviewer has the power to prevent bad work being published, even if from a respected figure in the field. Of these three criteria it is the last that I’d have most doubts about, even In well edited journals.
A thought provoking post. Regarding peer reviewed science, I can offer the perspective that anonymous peer review is quite often not nice at all. But, having said that, unless a paper is extremely poor, adversarial reviews are rarely needed. A good critical constructive review can point out severe problems without raising the hackles of the author(s) unnecessarily and is more likely to get them dealt with properly than an overly adversarial review. This works so long as the process is private, the reviewer is truly anonymous, and the reviewer has the power to prevent bad work being published, even if from a respected figure in the field. Of these three criteria it is the last that I’d have most doubts about, even In well edited journals.