It's happening...

As usual, eLife leads the way.

(h/t @deaneckles) https://twitter.com/michaelhoffman/status/1333810695138406402

Best way to fix a broken, inefficient, archaic, actively counterproductive, deeply entrenched, and entirely unwilling/able to reform journal system is to out-compete it, and eLife is making a damn good case that it can actually be done.

Next necessary big leap in academic publication remaining is professionalizing, incentivizing, and systematizing peer review.

That's a much bigger leap than the others since it requires buy in from a wider variety of stakeholders and $ changing hands, but much bigger payoff too.

Honestly though; once you commit to a journal being a review/curation service rather than a distribution-level gatekeeper, you have to make the review/curation good and worth it, so I wouldn't be surprised to see eLife pushing in this direction soon....

Hell, I'll make a prediction, because since I've done some thought exercises and informal proposals here: eLife will start piloting paid reviewer/editor teams with public-oriented utility-based review frameworks for selected subsets of article types.

If they REALLY want to push this model and disrupt (ugh) the system, they should (and might) do two more things on top of that:
1) DOI the reviews and count them as publications
2) Use extra APC $ to review stuff published in the mega-journals.