Scientific Credibility Gap?

Lawrence K Altman, MD has story in today's NYT on a "credibility gap" for the peer-review system:
Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited. The flurry of episodes has led many people to ask why authors, editors and independent expert reviewers all failed to detect the problems before publication.

He links some of the fraud problems to the embargo policies of major journals, though I'm afraid I can't quite follow the logic.

The thing I did notice was that every cited example involved medicine. I'm not sure MD's are more dishonest than other scientists, but there certainly is a lot more money at stake - both for drug makers who sponsor research and for the profit making, advertising accepting journals involved.

Physics has mainly moved beyond print journals to the Arxiv. Gatekeeping there is picking up speed, but so far is mainly concerned with excluding authors who don't like string theory.

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