I'm an author on several physics papers published before I switched careers to become a programmer. So I've been published in "big name" (for physics) journals

I'm an author on several physics papers published before I switched careers to become a programmer. So I've been published in "big name" (for physics) journals. Peer review, even without people scamming it, is still broken. The reason is, presuming you have an ideal peer panel, everyone is competent in the art of the paper. This means that they are all working in schools of research relevant to the paper they are reviewing. Thus every paper either supports or opposes the peers school. If your paper helps confirm their theory, great. If not, they have a tendency to let politics get involved and reject the paper. Now, a lot of funding comes from government. Imagine the situation where government is funding research with a desired outcome. This desired outcome has a policy implications. Result: Your peer review system is going to highlight results that confirm the government's policy position because the peers are getting their paycheck there, and it is going to bury results the disagree with the position. I think that a better system would be to have peers give written reviews, that would be attached to the paper, with a rebuttal from the papers authors. Publish more papers, air differeing views, and make more money (since more paper sold means more library fees, etc.) Then peer review will be less about "censorship of radical ideas" than about "hypothesis-antithesis-synthesis". And yes, even in obscure areas of materials physics, there is a lot of politics... cause the stakes are so low.