Everybody is free to publish their research without going throught peer review even today. It can still be science, but won't be trusted much before someone of

Everybody is free to publish their research without going throught peer review even today. It can still be science, but won't be trusted much before someone of authority comments on it. Pre-publication peer review is a vehicle for winning "academia points", important for career promotions, grants and similar. Science then and now has depended on reviews from expert peers, it's just that the number of scientists (this is good, remember) has given a rise to scientific journals and formal pre-publication peer review to filter out some of the crap. Either side can be wrong in a peer review (or both), but the approach has to work in majority of the cases to be meaningful. Gamification is a problem with anything in life, so we just have to live with that and change when the method stops giving useful results.