Great post!
Just to point out—to people who are not yet familiar with it—there are initiatives that try to tackle the hazards of the current peer-review process, a good example is Plos one that uses a very different setup for publishing, maybe most interestingly is that they publish all articles that are technically sound, and judgment whether the article is interesting or not is reserved to post-publish commentary and it’s all open access.
Another big problem—that I guess people here are somewhat familiar with—is pharma funded clinical trial publication bias, e.i. you can do for example 10 smaller studies (same drug), rather than a couple big ones, and weed out the ones with a lesser positive impact (or even negative), and then pool your 6 studies with the best result. Though hopefully this problem will be partly fixed with the new FDA legislation that requires pharmaceutical companies to do a priori registrations of clinical trails.
We are a relatively small group in Stockholm that will be graced with Cat’s presences, if you are in the neighborhood and want to join us, feel free to PM me.