[Kessler83]

Nature is a world leading journal with a very rigorous review process. They publish less than a tenth of the (proper) submissions they get. So the science here is likely to have high quality.

As for the Guardian article, there are some pretty heavy direct quotes in there, in case you don't trust the journalist's assessment (I don't see any strong reason why you wouldn't).

[robbedpeter]

At this point, it's well known that journals are broken. The whole replication crisis is a product of journals like Nature and NEJM.

Their authority has always been a sham, and will continue to be, because "Science" is not about gatekeeping. These journals are rent seeking, avaricious entities profiting by selling the illusion of quality and exclusivity to universities and research institutions that should know better.

Science is not about publish or perish. It's not about making the most money from patents and royalties and residuals. It is process which research papers contribute to, but those papers are just like any other arbitrary metric imposed on groups of people - when the metric becomes the goal, the output will be exploited and gamified. The people playing by the rules will lose when everyone else is cheating, and the cheating among science journals has been going on for more than 3 decades.

Trusting any paper is a naive thing to do, but trusting a paper because of the supposed reputation of the journal is just silly.

Trust collections of research that uses reproducible experimentation and rigorous scientific methodology that reinforces ideas over a broad spectrum of literature. These journals are a toxic influence and the sooner they die off the better.

[Kessler83]

Wow, tell me how you really feel :).

It's not a "supposed reputation" though. Nature is listed as a world-leading journal (class 2) by the internationally widely acknowledged research register "Norwegian Register". The double blind reviews aren't performed by Nature, but by peer scientists. And it isn't gate-keeping. You have every opportunity to publish your stuff in another journal or simply on the internet if you want to. A lot of scientists do the latter before trying to get it into prominent journal. Even in the case of a rejection, the feed-back you get from reviewers is often of very high quality, as in really helping you make your article better, as most journals give the review jobs to experienced scientists in your field.

In other words, a world leading journal generally contributes greatly to what you say in your last paragraph.

That said, I agree with most of your statements in the third paragraph (publish and perish etc.). It's not like I'm claiming that the current system is fine without side-effects, fake-journals etc.. I just don't think there is cause for the kind of suspicions voiced in the thread, in relation to Nature or the OP article.