I'm not sure that the system was ever that near to perfection: for example, John Maddox of Nature didn't like the advent of pre-publication peer review, but that presumably had something to do with it limiting his discretion to approve and desk-reject whatever he wanted. But in any case it (like other aspects of the cozy interwar and then wartime scientific world) could surely never have survived the huge scaling-up that had already begun in the post-war era and created the pressure to switch to pre-publication peer reivew in the first place.

Peer review existed before 1951 in the US at least. See for example Einstein’s reaction to negative reviews when he tried to publish in Physical Review in 1935 https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-t...

> coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father

A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.

I wish you had highlighted or bolded "cartel", which is exactly how those industry players act.

>Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father)

perhaps a bit off-topic, but what is coincidental about this and/or what is the relevance of Ghislaine Maxwell here?

Some "fun" reading on the subject of Mr. Maxwell:

https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines

tl;dr He is the bridge that uncomfortably links Biden's former Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to Jeffrey Epstein and Mossad. Hence, *gestures at the last couple of weeks and years*. Dude was just, like, Fraud Central, apparently.

>scientists focused on quality not quantity.

I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature.

He didn't look at methodology or data.

From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method.

It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.