Over-reliance on Trust and Lack of Objectivity

The present system is insufficiently objective as it relies, at each stage, on certain assumptions, trust and good faith.
•          Peer reviews are conducted without a reliable system to counteract bias.
•          Publishers have a potential conflict of interest, as they must decide what research is worth publishing from both a scientific and commercial standpoint.
Over-reliance of trust on authors:  In the current system, authors wishing to publish are unable to be fully objective with their own research, and may overestimate the validity of their data in order to craft a story that is deemed suitable or novel enough for publication.  Since most of the data that are obtained by the researchers and authors are in the centralised system such as their local servers and computers, data can be massaged, manipulated or mutated to sell the best narrative.  Authors are also trusted that they remain objective in the face of hypothesis-defying results and interpret the date carefully and objectively.  While crowdsourced wisdom is becoming a thing of importance in science, it is still more of an exception than a norm.  As a result, the trust is placed in a centralised manner on authors to perform and publish science objectively.  However, some scientists do take advantage of the system to manipulate data to varying degrees and thus corrupt the system.  Scientists feel the pressure to omit ‘inconvenient truths’ that interfere with their developing storyline as the system demands stories, rather than science to be published.  The result is an overwhelming number of irreproducible studies.  Estimates are that around ⅔ of published work is not reproducible and that some of the work is a result of fraudulence (citation: NYTimes, Economist)
Over-reliance on the peer review system: Peer review is fundamental to scientific research and publishing, distinguishing it from virtually all other forms of output.  It forms the basis for quality control of academic research, by having scientists in the same field review each other's work and provide feedback to help decide wheter or not the research should be published. However, at present it is unclear whether it meets these simple functions, and there is a large potential for disruptive innovation in this area (e.g., Tennant et al., 2017).

Over-reliance of the publishers: control of the middlemen.

Another part where there is over-reliance of trust is with the publishers. Publishers profit from publicly funded research which they have not directly paid for any more than any other private corporation through general taxation. The cost and risk of publicly funded research is therefore often on the taxpayer.