[harry8]

>It's a shame that these papers were published before they were polished by the authors.

Saying nothing about these specific papers, in general I disagree strongly.

I find the peer review process to be extremely flawed. If you get a bunch of interest from experts in the field on the internet who comment and do work to understand, replicate and analyse (and without hiding behind fake-anonymity) that is a million times better in every dimension than anonymous "peer review." That is, it works better as a BS detector, it works better identifying issues in the data analysis, methodology and so on.

Anonymous peer review has been great compared to alternatives for hundreds of years, just now, our alternatives are frequently better than that.

[jcranmer]

For these papers in particular, it seems like peer review was badly needed before publication. Sure, it's a meme that Reviewer 2 is always going to complain that could you please run like, 50 more experiments, and for something as potentially groundbreaking as room-temp superconductor, even more so.

But one of the main issues with the papers right now is their chemistry is deficient. The key chemical reactions don't balance, and there's also an unexpected and unexplained oxidation state change in the copper. This is the kind of issue that would be flagged quickly in peer review, and it's the sort of catastrophic paper issue that makes replication problematic--how can you be sure that you're comparing against what the original sample was?

[harry8]

Sure and all of that is coming out in public with people's names and reputations attached to it. So we're certainly not behind on any of those issues. I say there are very real benefits too.