This is objectively worse. Commercial journals need to be bygone. I feel that the publishing venues in the field of machine learning are a great example of non

This is objectively worse. Commercial journals need to be bygone. I feel that the publishing venues in the field of machine learning are a great example of non commercial, (relatively) transparent, open access publications. Look at ICLR, ICML, ACL, NeurIPS, for instance. All of their proceedings are open access. Most papers their are available on arXiv as well (which has its pros and cons both that I'd rather not get into here). Many of them also have an open review process wherein the reviewers post their reviews for all to see in a forum like interface, allowing frequent back and forth with the authors. In the best case, its more akin to assist the authors refine their potentially sound findings, a dynamic process where the paper may get revised a couple times before acceptance. I believe journals need to adapt the openreview process. There are obvious parallels in the lifecycle of a journal submission (from submission to acceptance) and the openreview process, except that the latter is accelerated (for better or for worse).