The narrative would be more persuasive if it incorporated a story of how the paper evolved meaningfully in response to peer criticism. The question lingering in

The narrative would be more persuasive if it incorporated a story of how the paper evolved meaningfully in response to peer criticism. The question lingering in my mind after reading this is whether and how the paper was substantially revised (in light of reviewer feedback) between rejections. I'm sure it was (it has to have been, right?), but we don't get that feeling from the blog post. The author(s?) should have received a large amount of very good feedback between rejections from well-meaning peers in their scientific community. I don't recall reading about incorporating any of that feedback into subsequent revisions of the paper. The term "meta-analysis" probably should have been dropped after the first (pointed) rejection, for example, and the paper should probably have been broken down into two or three smaller papers rather than submitted as a 'meta-analysis' of unpublished work. This is not to say that peer feedback wasn't taken seriously. I don't know that at all. But if the goal is to persuade a skeptical audience that academic publishing is broken, the author should articulate how they followed best practices in response to rejection letters from peer-reviewed journals. The alternative is to sound arrogant and self-defeating, which I'm sure was not the intent!