Discover Magazine considers a new proposal for eliminating some of the bias from the peer review process.
...scientific manuscripts should be submitted for peer review with the results and discussion omitted. The reviewers would judge the submission on the strength of the methods and the introduction alone. If they recommended publication, the authors would then send them the full paper.
The reviewers would then have a chance to change their mind and reject it, or ask for further experiments to be carried out, but the ‘bar’ for this to happen would be high.
This is quite a neat idea, potentially removing much of the bias in the peer review process. Other problems would, however, remain. For example, You can imagine a paper that began "we updated all the major tree ring temperature proxies in North America and northern Europe" being rejected out of hand - there are some questions that people just don't want answered.