References/resources on problems surrounding peer review in physics? I was watching this video on YouTube (this is the second part of it) and it motivated me to ask this question.

From the videos:


  ....that's the good aspect of peer review. It should work to sift out problems with the interpretation, problems with the results. It should work to improve a paper. The problem is ..... there is a huge volume of stuff and we are increasingly getting swamped. .... here is one of the worst examples of where peer review has entirely failed. ....


The examples he talks about is discussed in this blog post.



When you zoom in, you can clearly see that it is photo-shopped.


  ...this is one of the top ranking journals in the fields...
  
  Now here is the really troublesome aspect... if they had done it better
  (you can see a much better photo-shopped image in the blog), how would we know.  Not only is money spent in that lab, other groups would chase this up and that's the worrying aspect and it builds and builds. Science is like that.
  
  In the past if the referees didn't pick it up, that was the end of the story. We now have something called the post publication peer review. There are sites ( PubPeer) and there are blogs (ChemBark, Chemistry Blog) where people upload paper and say well this looks like a great paper or in many cases they go "there is something I don't quite get here" and that leads to lots of comments from people in the field and I think this is where we are evolving to... away from the traditional peer review system. The publication is seen to be the start of the scientific process and not the end, where you generate debate.


My questions:

Are there other such examples in physics? Can you point me towards a blog/site or something of the sort that goes through these things?

Are there any blogs, articles or essays that discuss problems surrounding the peer-review process (in relation to physics). How it can improved, where alternative methods like post-publication review are discussed ? I know ChemBark for chemistry, I am looking for it's "equivalent" in physics.
I would like to slightly disagree with the Hauser's answer regarding the possible methods of scientific misconduct in physics. 

Unfortunately, in more theoretical parts of physics some people can manage to pretend that some complete and utter nonsense represents a new result well enough to fool the referees and editors and thus beat the peer review system.

A prominent example of this (to our luck, very rare, at least AFAIK)  phenomenon is the Bogdanov affair, see also e.g. the web page by John Baez on this and the Nature article on the ensuing scandal; a sample of the works involved is available through this Google Scholar query. The Bogdanov (a.k.a. Bogdanoff) brothers got their Ph.D.s using the papers in question, one in physics and one in mathematics, and in early 2000s have published a number of strange -- to put it very mildly -- papers in a number of reputed physics journals, including Classical and Quantum Gravity and Annals of Physics (and e.g. the Annals of Physics paper is still there -- it is not withdrawn until today). The papers were not just wrong -- they turned out to be downright gibberish.

In the light of the Bogdanov affair it is not a big surprise that sometimes peer review also fails to detect even a really large-scale plagiarism, as in the infamous case of more than 60 works by a group of Turkish physicists who plagiarized earlier work, see e.g. the Nature article and this post at Peter Woit's blog for details.

Unlike the Jan Hendrik Schön case, AFAIK the papers by Bogdanov brothers did not involve experimental data or predict outcomes of reasonably doable experiments, so their case is pretty much a pure peer review failure at the level of the referees and editors (and of course a failure of their thesis advisors too). 

IMHO, the Bogdanov affair shows that the argument regarding going to production and post-publication review from the Hauser's answer does not seem to work well in the more theoretical parts of physics, especially when the authors make no readily verifiable experimental predictions.