This isn't that surprising. It's common knowledge in the academic community that: * There are bogus open access journals which exist solely to make money from

This isn't that surprising. It's common knowledge in the academic community that: * There are bogus open access journals which exist solely to make money from author fees. * There are bogus conferences that follow a similar business strategy. * There are lower-quality journals and conferences that do not attract many top-quality submissions, so tend to have a lower barrier for acceptance: you might get work that's rigorous and unexciting, work that's exciting but preliminary or rough around the edges, or work that's neither rigorous nor interesting. * Peer reviews vary widely in quality, from being thorough to overly critical and nit-picking to being cursory. This is extremely frustrating to many people, but is hardly an undiscussed issue. One particular problem is that more junior reviewers are often reluctant to criticize a paper unless they're very confident in their understanding, either due to it being slightly outside of their core expertise, or due to convoluted presentation: it's easier to assume it's correct than to go out on a limb criticizing something. I would say that being published in a peer reviewed article is just the start of a gauntlet that any serious scientific claim has to run, regardless of the quality of peer review. Plenty of important work has started out as being extremely controversial: even once it got published people didn't necessarily think it was right. The consensus does continue to evolve. I've never met a scientist who will believe something just because it's in a peer reviewed article.