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by unmole 958 days ago
> They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.

The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.

1 comments

Even top journals in hard sciences sometimes publish papers that aren't actually peer reviewed based solely on the authors credentials. I once heard a National Academy member claim they get some number of papers automatically published into PNAS bypassing review as part of their position. Those papers aren't flagged as different than the others.

On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".