Anywho who said anything about a conspiracy? This stuff has existed in science for a long time. Just moreso now than in the past. Touchiness on the subject is through the roof, though.
Cause nature is a conspiracy site right?
http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400
I think this is an interesting point. What gets into journals and what doesn't is a bit of a game of who knows who. In fact, many if not most journals will ask you about people you don't want reviewing your paper and why (usually its a personal reason).
The other interesting thing about journal publications is that people don't ask to see your data. They only see the results that you choose to publish in the form that you publish them. Overall it isn't too much of an issue because they can ask you for additional information and analysis and in general people are quite ethical about what they publish (the penalty for fraud is essentially death to your career). However, what this has lead to something called a publication bias where in general what we know about are the things people choose to publish, usually their successes rather than their failures which may outweigh those successes 10x fold. This is important because if you combine studies looking at the same thing and lump in all the failures to the successes, often those successes end up going away all together as most successes these days are quite small. (For example, imagine a high school teacher who puts on his resume that 10 of his recent 30 students are now in Ivy league schools someplace but fails to mention that for the past 5 years, no student of his was accepted into a college. He is taking advantage of a publication bias)
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