Peer Review is useless, case 22527

This is the second time I’ve discussed open peer review reports of one of my articles, the previous time is here. This post is also a follow up of this one.

When looking at discussions of this paper I often see people emphasize that it isn’t peer-reviewed:

That’s funny, because it has been peer-reviewed. Even more funny, peer review didn’t change the article at all! Don’t believe me? The reviews are publicly available.

Our preprint (and submission) did contain some minor mistakes, and typically I would use the fact that the reviewers didn’t notice them to bemoan the quality of the reviews and peer review in general, but expecting the reviewers to notice the mistakes we had in the preprint is too much to ask. If the mistakes were easy to notice we would have noticed them, ha!

In his review of our article, Michael Schlussel opens:

I would like to congratulate the authors for their challenging initiative and thorough work.

Our paper is an achievement to be aspired to, so clearly this reviewer knows what he’s talking about, but no matter how shitty your paper is you can find reviewers that will love it. If someone only uses the peer-review status of a paper to judge its quality they are either not a scientist and don’t know better, or they are an idiot.