I'm not sure that the system was ever that near to perfection: for example, John Maddox of Nature didn't like the advent of pre-publication peer review, but that presumably had something to do with it limiting his discretion to approve and desk-reject whatever he wanted. But in any case it (like other aspects of the cozy interwar and then wartime scientific world) could surely never have survived the huge scaling-up that had already begun in the post-war era and created the pressure to switch to pre-publication peer reivew in the first place.

>scientists focused on quality not quantity.

I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature.

He didn't look at methodology or data.

From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method.

It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.

> coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father

A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.

>Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father)

perhaps a bit off-topic, but what is coincidental about this and/or what is the relevance of Ghislaine Maxwell here?

Some "fun" reading on the subject of Mr. Maxwell:

https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines

tl;dr He is the bridge that uncomfortably links Biden's former Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to Jeffrey Epstein and Mossad. Hence, *gestures at the last couple of weeks and years*. Dude was just, like, Fraud Central, apparently.