| Reviewers are intentionally hidden from view. The reason is to prevent social or political backlash from a poor review. In fact, it is sometimes the case that papers reviews are double blind, the reviews do not know the names of the authors either. This is also to prevent bias on the part of the reviewers. This secrecy is a positive and important part of the peer review system. Science should not be politically or socially biased. The immutability of published works is also crucial. It routine for writers to leave out details covering in prior works. This saves immense amounts of time on both writers consumers of scientific works. However, it also means that it is crucial that all cited works be preserved forever. If a document truly goes missing, then entire lines of work become incomplete. Papers can and are infrequently withdrawn, but as far as I know, the work is not erased, but merely marked as bad. The way updates or corrections are made is via newer papers revisiting topics. But it remains that at every step some amount of decent due diligence is done to correct errors and not clutter up the records with incomplete versions. As great as the web is for unstructured content, you cannot easily apply it to every area, and especially not to scientific publications. There are plenty of other examples of curated sources on the web that crucial. Map systems, curated databases of restaurants, directories of people like LinkedIn and Facebook, and even Wikipedia can be counted a curated system due to its system of editors. Scientists have always and are still free to share data, white papers, and whatever else outside the peer review system. The main reason peer review is still here is that no suitable alternative has ever been proposed that addresses all the points that peer review does. There is a push towards open access journals to benefit the world at large though. I understand that you are passionate about this, but I'm not convinced by your arguments. |