I'd say the experiment (relying on the summary provided here) shows what works: - Papers that are obviously poor are rejected. - Papers that are uncontroversial

I'd say the experiment (relying on the summary provided here) shows what works: - Papers that are obviously poor are rejected. - Papers that are uncontroversially good are accepted. From a CS point of view, the problem is that in many communities, what is 'uncontroversially good' depends on subtleties only known to insiders who are willing to comply with the quirks of a community. And most communities are very defensive when it comes to shielding their top venues from relative outsiders, who are not sufficiently close to the inner circle of key players. As a consequence, getting the top-venue stamp (required to please the administration) becomes a social game. I think having a more open review process and stronger editorial control (vs. reviewer power) can mitigate this problem to some extent, for the following reasons: 1. When a paper is good, but upsets the subjective feelings of reviewers, the system should be implemented in a way that there is a high social cost for killing a paper because of subjective/cosmetic issues. Having venues where papers that are sent out to reviewers are most likely reasonable and should only be killed because of 'hard' flaws creates such a system. 2. When a paper is bad and the editors push it through, publishing details of the paper's editorial flow would impose social costs on the editors. (The reviewers, who may be potentially early in their career and may need protection, may even remain anonymous, the editors, who typically enjoy a strong standing in the community, should not.) In CS, journals tend to operate a bit closer to this model than conferences, which I think makes the journal submission and revision process more meaningful. To conclude, I don't think getting rid of rejects is the solution, but rather editorial policies that encourage reviewers to either expose fatal technical flaws in a paper or help the authors improve the presentation to achieve a better end-result.