A scientist's perspective on peer review
From a post about peer review at the blog Unqualified Offerings:
"The simple fact of peer review is that it’s actually quite a modest hurdle. All you have to do is find one editor and a couple of reviewers who find the work plausible and well-executed. Once you’ve been on both sides of the process, you realize that it’s just a preliminary quality check, a first pass before it’s put out there for a wider audience. Some laymen seem to attribute too much significance to it, and other laymen seem to recoil against that misperception by concluding that peer review is too weak of a system. The truth is that it’s not supposed to be a stringent filter. It’s just supposed to be a first pass."