I agree with you, but with reservations. The existing model asks volunteer academics to rate papers on three principle axes: novelty, importance, and rigor. Th

I agree with you, but with reservations. The existing model asks volunteer academics to rate papers on three principle axes: novelty, importance, and rigor. The journals don't do much here except find these academics and send them a handful of papers to look at. Further, novelty and importance seem to be overshadowing everything else in reviews and they are both extremely subjective and can entrench existing biases in a subfield. Whether this metric is "reasonable" is a bit contentious. I agree with you that a system of open publishing plus some post-publish evaluation would be nice. But you don't really need the journals for this. Or you certainly don't need journals making billions in profit to do this.