"And reviews also vary widely in their conclusions – how they rate papers and whether they recommend editors to accept or reject the paper." This is assumed to

"And reviews also vary widely in their conclusions – how they rate papers and whether they recommend editors to accept or reject the paper." This is assumed to be a bug, and not a feature. A lot of this comes from different perspectives, weighting, etc. Widening the number of reviewers isn't going to reduce the variance on this. You see it in grant review panels as well, which are much more "discuss and engage with your fellow reviewers". "We live in a very different world today than we did when journals were circulated through print: One with the Internet, where data and research don’t need to be circulated in limited and expensive publications. Research can be shared almost immediately with massive networks of scientists through blogs, preprints [1] , data storage platforms and online forums, at little to no cost." One of the assumptions here is that this access is uniform. It isn't. During COVID-19, some senior scientists essentially went with "Publication via press release", when more junior scientists can't do that. The popularity of figures on my field's Twitter hashtag is astonishingly non-uniform, cuts out whole swathes of people (govt. scientists), and is only lightly correlated IMO with the impact of their work. I will say that, when I was a junior scientist, getting some of my work in good journals carried it much further than internet distribution would have. "Finally, other types of centralized platforms could be hugely important too. Journals currently have exclusivity agreements (meaning researchers can only submit to one journal at a time) but they also have different formatting requirements, which take a long time to fulfill. By one survey estimate, articles are submitted an average of two times before they are published, and formatting takes up a total of 14 hours per article." The number of journals that only require formatting post-acceptance is growing, and is awesome. When it comes down to it, I think peer review's biggest strength is actually something the author takes as a negative. It's not "This paper has only been reviewed by two people", it's that every paper in this journal has been reviewed by at least two people, plus the public. For a lot of papers, I'm actually skeptical that that number is lower than if we went with "Well, the community will review it in the fullness of time".