Peer review: Objective screening or wishful thinking?

Despite the massive changes in academic publishing in recent years, one thing remains more or less constant: the disdain many academics feel for peer review, and perhaps for peer reviewers themselves. This is possibly the most contentious and secretive practice in our academic lives, reviled and tolerated in equal measure but rarely loved. Slow, biased, contradictory, hurtful or wilfully obtuse, reviewers come in for a lot of stick. But are the criticisms levelled at peer review merited or is it an effective means of separating the sweet from the sour? Here I argue that while there is a lot wrong with peer review, it serves an important function for the academic community and that ERPP teachers have a role to play in making it work.