I'm sorry, but I must disagree with the spirit of your points.

Scientists publish in slow peer reviewed journals, because scientific publication has to be peer reviewed. The reviewers are a very small selection of other scientists, who are expert in the field of the publication.

So, when you throw work out into the open, anyone with an interest in your topic (your functional peers) will be able to do their own analysis of your work (a review)--some sort of peer-review, if you will. All without needing to go through a stodgy paper review process.

This way of work is important to keep quality excellent. We certainly don't need more quickly published junk that stirs the world but is found to be inaccurate later.

So, if there is one thing we've seen in the programming world, secluded cabals of experts don't always result in excellent quality (I submit to you, OpenGL, C++, CORBA, for a few examples).

New patches are submitted to open-source projects all the time; some are accepted, some are rebuked publicly, and some merely catalyze interesting discussion. "Stirring the world" is hardly a bad thing--in the case of Fleischmann-Pons, the debunking happened quickly and the world was free to move on. In a similar avenue, one of the reasons that the eCat story is frustrating is the lack of transparency (both from the inventors and the media refusing to even air solid rebuttals)--were the information more open, we could sort it into bunk/science and move on.

Can we accelerate the process of peer reviewing? I doubt that. As I have written, the reviewers are other scientists who have to find the time to read and comment new articles. The more time they spend with this, the less time they spend doing research. So the small amount of experts usually is responsible for being slow.

So, you make the (valid) claim that the process can't go faster, predicating on the scarcity of experts. You seem to have the answer at hand: get more experts. This can be accomplished by either getting more researchers reviewing, or loosening the restrictions on who is considered a valid source. Indeed, places like StackExchange have shown us how to pick out decently good judges of these things--we don't have as great a need for the older method of establishing experts, anymore.

2. The author writes, we could make progress faster. Please: why? It seems to be a sign of the time that we want to accelerate everything. It is most likely that this will only produce more noise. We need to slow down our lives and our thinking to stay accurate and produce real value.

In order to help motivate the need for faster progress, please note the following:

Earth has over 7 billion people now. (http://www.unfpa.org/swp/)

The bottom 50% of people in the world (rightly or wrongly) own around 1% of the wealth. (http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jv048hx#page-4)

We (at least those of us in the first world) don't have a lot of time left, unless we can find ways of solving the Big Problems. Progress in tech is likely the only palatable solution to this predicament. We can't really afford to slow down now.

I am glad that science results, at least in my field, are still reliably scrutinized by many. This way I know that reading and spending the time to understand the stuff is worth my time.

I'm greatly concerned about this sort of attitude. Might I suggest that an occasional dalliance in "time-wasting" articles might prove refreshing, and further that it could help ferret out ideas that would otherwise be overlooked?

edit: Modified for civility. Sorry folks.