"most peer-reviewed published science is useless rubbish"

It seems that Marc Hendrickx's criticism of the peer review system has struck a cord with at least one of the Sydney Morning Herald's readers. Letter writer Jon Jenkins makes the following point:

From today's Sydney Morning Herald 15/11/2008:

"The system of peer review in science has become corrupted, with rorts such as rampant cross-authoring (putting names of non-contributing colleagues on papers to build their CVs) and "coffee time" agreements to approve each other's works.
Almost all grants, funding, pay, promotions and accolades are as a result of numbers of papers published. A far more useful statistic would be the number of citations, a measure of the work's usefulness.
As stunning as it is that most published papers are found to be false within five years, two other statistics are even more blunt: 50 per cent of publications are never read by anyone, and 95 per cent of peer-reviewed science is never cited, other than by the authors themselves.
In other words, most peer-reviewed published science is useless rubbish. "

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/letters/when-it-comes-to-trains-make-ours-a-double/2008/11/14/1226318921706.html

Hard to agrue with those figures Jon, but were they peer reviewed?