Academia

Interesting. I'm not sure what the exact path forward would be, but a couple observations. The first is that I do think the lack of transparency into things like peer review hurts the scientific community overall. Often when I don't fully understand why a piece of code is the way it is, reading the comments of the original PR can be really illuminating. Being able to see what sort of issues were raised about a paper during review and how the author handled them could, I imagine, add a lot of valuable context to the paper itself.

The next thing I'm noticing is something my academic friends complain about a lot: the vengeful, egotistic nature of many high-level academics. I don't really know how to solve this problem when stuff isn't anonymous, but I have to imagine that an author being able to see why their paper was recommended against and even being able to respond to it would be good for the author in the long run. In software you learn not to take someone deciding to reject your pull request personally, but also when someone rejects a good PR everyone else can also see that.

Overall I think the process helps blunt egos a little, and also shines a light on those that can't get past their egos in a way that is also healthy for the community. But yeah, I hear you and don't have a 100% good solution to egotistic retribution beyond vague noises about that being a cultural issue that needs to be changed and a vague sense I can't back up with data that opening up the communication lines to public scrutiny might actually help shine a light on that culture and change it.