The good news is that science remains, for the most part, self-correcting. After peer review, numerous errors are uncovered and one site, Retraction Watch, is devoted to being an internal watch dog.
Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, who manages $30 billion a year in government funding for science, has said that
"Factors include poor training of researchers in experimental design; increased emphasis on making provocative statements rather than presenting technical details; and publications that do not report basic elements of experimental design.
PNAS is only one example of that. Any number of journals have also begun to engage in 'light editorial' review, but PNAS is the only one that will allow NAS members to bypass peer review for their personal friends. For example, in the sexist hurricanes story, psychology professor Susan Fiske of Princeton, a member of the NAS since 2013, personally approved the article, even though it had glaring errors.
For hermaphroditic frogs, the friendly voice inside the National Academy was David B. Wake of Berkeley,
and it also says, "This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor"
Wake is no stranger, he works with Hayes, they are good friends. About harassing emails Hayes sent to Syngenta employees that said things like “Ya fulla my j*z right now!” , Wake told Rachel Aviv, who profiled Hayes in The New Yorker, that those emails were "quite hilarious." It's unclear what Berkeley would think about its female employees being forcefully inseminated by a man, but it seems odd that PNAS would find a personal friend of someone who says such things, who thinks they are "quite hilarious", to be objective enough to give it a peer review. Berkeley has to wonder what female undergraduates taking Wake in class will think that he finds rape analogies hilarious.
"And some scientists reputedly use a ‘secret sauce’ to make their experiments work — and withhold details from publication or describe them only vaguely to retain a competitive edge
A website called Retraction Watch covers this sort of thing. They covered the story of a paper in PNAS from 2009, which claimed that ancestors of butterflies accidentally mated with velvet worms and so now caterpillars become butterflies. That clearly was not peer reviewed.
In 2002, a PNAS paper claimed that pesticides were leading to hermaphroditic frogs. The hand-picked editor for the paper was David Wake of Berkeley, who just happens to be friends with Tyrone Hayes, the lead author. In 2010, another paper by the same lead author said the same herbiicide, called atrazine, led to complete feminization of frogs. The hand-picked friendly editor for the paper that time? Once again Professor David Wake, Hayes' friend at Berkeley.
He clearly favors Hayes. When Rachel Aviv profiled Hayes in The New Yorker, she asked about the somewhat aggressive emails he wrote, including to female Syngenta employees, that said things like “Ya fulla my j*z right now!” and Wake said they were
"quite hilarious". Maybe, but he is likely not a neutral party asking hard questions about research
A few months later, PNAS accounced thay they were getting rid of those 'Communicated by' articles completely and everyone could still do direct submission. For the most part, it seems to have worked but clearly articles can still slip through.
PNAS is not the only journal with this problem. Professor Michael Eisen, who is also in the biology department at Berkeley where Hayes and Wake work, has a special status because he is co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), which was specifically created to wrest publicly-funded studies from corporate control. He wrote in an email, "We need to get away from the notion, proven wrong on a daily basis, that peer review of any kind at any journal means that a work of science is correct. What it means is that a few (1-4) people read it over and didn't see any major problems. That's a very low bar in even the best of circumstances."
Obviously if four strangers is not enough, one friend is not going to be a valid peer review.
PLOS is also leading the way in solving the other issue that Collins mentioned and that was a flaw in the papers listed here: no data. It's easy to create a pretty picture and say that is a result, especially if it is something controversial or outrageous. most scientists are ethical, but relying on personal ethics is not how science is vetted, especially if a researcher is clearly an advocate.
