In the line of your comment about tax payers money: one of the biggest issues IMHO is the disfunctional "market" here because most of the work is paid easily by

In the line of your comment about tax payers money: one of the biggest issues IMHO is the disfunctional "market" here because most of the work is paid easily by the tax payer . Particularly publishers are mostly not paying for reviews but are paid for journal and conferences largely on quantity (with few noble exceptions). The effect for a long time now was an ever increasing number of conferences (peer reviewed proceedings still make a large share in CS) and journals. What is actually worse IMHO, the review request get more and more and are largely boring. So you really have to attract the attention of the reviewer to not trigger the reflex of looking for reasons to reject (or worse the opposite, which may account to the same because there are always other reviewers, so its a matter of luck who gets assigned) I think better structures are needed that actually incentivise good reviews. This would lead to better papers, too. There are multiple options for this. Maybe it is simply time to see reviews as publications themselves and say goodbye to flawed blinded review process. Another thing would be to take the publishers out of the game. Even IEEE and ACM have become largely a playing field for power politics between the US, China and Europe . I think we could do better and be more inclusive here. Publishing reviews and rejected work would further make meta studies much more reliable removing also bias towards positive results (who actually wants to hear about easily replicatable negative results at a conference)