Peer review is not the reason academic research has turned into a garbage fire - it's because of the corporatization of the university and the transition from t

Peer review is not the reason academic research has turned into a garbage fire - it's because of the corporatization of the university and the transition from the open research model to the patent-seeking profit-generating research model. The latter has its place, certainly, but before the 1980s that place was industry-funded private research institutions, the most famous and well-known being Bell Labs. These institutions were funded by groups of corporations who in return got first dibs on their patentable work, and the researchers and engineers in turn got good salaries and didn't have any teaching responsibilities. After Bayh-Dole passed in the 1980s, universities were allowed to grant exclusive licenses to their patentable research to private entities, and this resulted in the rise of the corporate univesity model - people running around hiding their data until they got the patent, people fudging results to make their novel drug look good so their startup would be bought by some pharma corporation, administrations being overrun by pharmaceutical executives who only cared about universities generating a steady stream of patents, and forget about quality-of-teaching. It's been a complete disaster, and not only that, the private research world has largely been defunded as corporations realized that, with the aid of politicians, they could just outsource basic R&D to universities, using grad students as cheap underpaid lab labor on projects where they're little more than glorified lab techs, and not really doing any original research. In addition, the whole system is increasingly authoritarian and censorship is rife - any academic who calls for the elimination of exclusive licensing and the adoption of open-source drug discovery will soon find themselves without a job. It's similar in many ways to the Lysenko era in Soviet science, just run by corporate authoritarians instead of Stalinists. Avoid if possible.