Peer review is slow because publishing and retracting used to take a long time, now it is instant.
Have you ever done a peer review? It took me hours to do each one. To do it well, you have to stare at each procedure and each conclusion and try to imagine what could be going wrong.
You may also have to read a lot of literature, both in general (so that you can recognize the difference between something genuinely new and something that was already published in 1975) and in particular (so that you can make sure the manuscript is not misrepresenting its own references).
And, given what's at stake in a review – you're basically holding a year or more of some grad student's life in your hands, at a minimum – it's only respectful to take it seriously.
perhaps it would make sense for the journal to employ professional scientists that only review...
This is either obvious, or silly. Obvious, to the extent that journals always have employed scientifically trained editors – they're called "editors" – to do everything from tweaking bad phrasing to offering criticism to ultimately making the final decision about what gets published. Silly, because journal editors are rarely experts in your specific field. How can they be? There are a lot of scientific fields. It's impossible to be "up to date on all the current research" in every single one of them, to the requisite level of detail. And most fields aren't awash in money to the extent that they can support a full-time editor with complete expertise. In the general case, you have to rely on peer review because only your peers have the incentive to be experts in your field.
I'm not saying that peer review doesn't take a long time to do it right, but I'm saying that perhaps a new job can be created who's job is to review and stay current on the literature. I'm not saying one person can know everything, but that there may be a better way. We have more scientists and papers being published every year, and I'm making the argument that we've outgrown current procedures. This is not an editorial job, this job does exactly what current peer reviewers do -- but it's their full time job.
Could I be wrong, sure -- but if the field is so big that a dedicated person can't keep on top of it then there is no chance for a scientist to do that either. The biggest issue is whether there is an incentive for someone with the skills to do it; why would I want to just review the work of others when I have the skills to do my own.
The point is that the skill set to be able to do science and to judge scientific manuscripts are very close together. Keeping on top of one is keeping on top of the other.
Journals should probably pay people to review works (well, really it will be included in a submission cost). But many people are resistent to the idea.
Have you ever done a peer review? It took me hours to do each one. To do it well, you have to stare at each procedure and each conclusion and try to imagine what could be going wrong.
You may also have to read a lot of literature, both in general (so that you can recognize the difference between something genuinely new and something that was already published in 1975) and in particular (so that you can make sure the manuscript is not misrepresenting its own references).
And, given what's at stake in a review – you're basically holding a year or more of some grad student's life in your hands, at a minimum – it's only respectful to take it seriously.
perhaps it would make sense for the journal to employ professional scientists that only review...
This is either obvious, or silly. Obvious, to the extent that journals always have employed scientifically trained editors – they're called "editors" – to do everything from tweaking bad phrasing to offering criticism to ultimately making the final decision about what gets published. Silly, because journal editors are rarely experts in your specific field. How can they be? There are a lot of scientific fields. It's impossible to be "up to date on all the current research" in every single one of them, to the requisite level of detail. And most fields aren't awash in money to the extent that they can support a full-time editor with complete expertise. In the general case, you have to rely on peer review because only your peers have the incentive to be experts in your field.