To your second point, I have two things to say: 1) I think a big point of this article is that the peer review process is misunderstood by the general public (

To your second point, I have two things to say: 1) I think a big point of this article is that the peer review process is misunderstood by the general public (and perhaps many doctors). Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it. Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, "Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth." More work needs to go into educating the public as to the meaning of scientific studies. 2) The scope of money involved in the endeavor is too large to be happy with things just slowly weeding themselves out as is permitted in the OS community. Higher standards can and should be enforced in all medical studies, an area in which progress is being made but there is a ways to go. Let me push back and say, if the medical research community was exactly like the open source community, we're not asking much of those who are doing the research.