Theological waccaloons win because they are powered by religious fervor and exhaust normal people

Some self-congratulatory meeting of the OpenAccess Illuminati* took place recently and a summary of takeaway points has been posted by Stephen Curry (the other one).

These people are exhausting. They just keep bleating away with their talking points and refuse entirely to ever address the clear problems with their plans.

Anonymous peer review exists for a reason.

To hear them tell it, the only reason is so hateful incompetent reviewers can prevent their sterling works of genius from being published right away.

This is not the reason for having anonymous peer review in science.

Their critics regularly bring up the reason we have anonymous peer review and the virtues of such an approach. The OA Illuminati refuse to address this. At best they will vaguely acknowledge their understanding of the issue and then hand wave about how it isn’t a problem just …um…because they say so.

It’s also weird that 80%+ of their supposed problems with peer review as we know it are attributable to their own participation in the Glamour Science game. Some of them also see problems with GlamHumping but they never connect the dots to see that Glamming is the driver of most of their supposed problems with peer review as currently practiced.

Which tells you a lot about how their real goals align with the ones that they talk about in public.

Edited to add:
Professor Curry weighed in on twitter to insist that the goal is not to force everyone to sign reviews. See, his plan allows people to opt out if they choose. This is probably even worse for the goal of getting an even-handed and honest review of scientific papers. And even more tellingly, is designing the experiment so that it cannot do anything other than provide evidence in support of their hypothesis. Neat trick.

Here’s how it will go down. People will sign their reviews when they have “nice, constructive” things to say about the paper. BSDs, who are already unassailable and are the ones self-righteously saying they sign all their reviews now, will continue to feel free to be dicks. And the people** who feel that attaching their name to their true opinion will still feel pressure. To not review, to soft-pedal and sign or to supply an unsigned but critical review. All of this is distorting.

Most importantly for the open-review fans, it will generate a record of signed reviews that seem wonderfully constructive or deserved (the Emperor’s, sorry BSDs, critical pants are very fine indeed) and a record of seemingly unconstructive critical unsigned reviews (which we can surely dismiss because they are anonymous cowards). So you see? It proves the theory! Open reviews are “better” and anonymous reviews are mean and unjustified. It’s a can’t-miss bet for these people.

The choice to not-review is significant. I know we all like to think that “obvious flaws” would occur to anyone reading a paper. That’s nonsense. Having been involved in manuscript and grant review for quite some time now I am here to tell you that the assigned reviewers (typically 3) all provide unique insight. Sometimes during grant review other panel members see other things the three assigned people missed and in manuscript review the AE or EIC see something. I’m sure you could do parallel sets of three reviewers and it would take quite a large sample before every single concern has been identified. Comparing this experience to the number of comments that are made in all of the various open-commenting systems (PubMed Commons commenting system was just shuttered for lack of general interest by the way) and we simply cannot believe claims that any reviewer can be omitted*** with no loss of function. Not to mention the fact that open commenting systems are just as subject to the above discussed opt-in problems as are signed official review systems of peer review.
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*hosted at HHMI headquarters which I’m sure tells us nothing about the purpose

**this is never an all-or-none associated with reviewer traits. It will be a manuscript-by-manuscript choice process which makes it nearly impossible to assess the quelling and distorting effect this will have on high quality review of papers.

***yes, we never have an overwhelmingly large sample of reviewers. The point here is the systematic distortion.