Operational failure: There is a distinction between the ideal of peer review and its implementation. It is unclear whether it meets the standards to which it is held, and mounting evidence that it fails to find errors in research, while discriminating against research which is viewed to be disruptive or innovative.
Wasteful: Often, manuscripts must go through repeated rounds of the ‘reject and resubmit’ cycle at different journals as researchers search for a venue of publication. This delays the communication of research while exposing redundancy in the process, as these reviews will often never be shared or used.
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.
Private journals achieve high profit margins from publicly funded research, both by charging fees to publish and to access.
We attribute both desire and demand to tell stories creates pressure in focussing only on publishable stories and not observations. During a research study, researchers make observations and discoveries which for various reasons are not published. Observations may be unrelated to the researcher’s area of study, resulting in the researcher not including it in the research paper as it is not relevant to them and it would cost more money to undertake further research to investigate further. The researcher may not understand the importance of their finding, or the finding may be interesting but run counter to the narrative of the article the researcher is writing.
Reluctance To Publish Reproduced Results: Being able to reproduce results is one of the cornerstones of high quality science. However, most journals are not interested in publishing reproduced results, as they are deemed to have low commercial value. Scientists are unable to easily verify whether a finding is true or not. A substantial amount of research which could contribute massively to the scientific world and society as a whole is wasted and never published. Money, resources, and time are wasted trying to perform analyses and gather data that have been done before, but simply never published.