The presence in a journal is not a grade. It is a "pass".

Perhaps some journals only let grade "A" papers pass, but sometimes that same journal has an editor who might let their buddy's article slip through. If one is part of the old boys club, this is a nice situation.

What eLife wants are signed grades from editors and reviewers. The editor is supposed to attach a brief summary in a few sentences summarizing the reviews. Hopefully one might bother to read a sentence or two to evaluate a paper instead of merely looking at the cover of the journal.

eLife's move here is basically a statement that the system is corrupt. Those wanting to fight the corruption are trying to increase transparency and reduce arbitrary decisions.

The whole point is that journal prestige is harmful and fake. It's prestige by association. That's not how science should work.

The change just means that the stamp of approval is not the journal name, which is fine. If you think about it, that system is a bizarre and lazy way to attribute value to a piece of work. The book publishing model figures out which books are great without caring at all about who publishes something (for the most part)

They're not removing the stamp of approval:

> with a short editorial assessment of the work’s significance and rigour

However, not getting the stamp of approval will no longer lead to the work not being accessible to people.

> every course would only provide a review of a student instead of grades

Would it? You'd think that a hiring manager would rather see a description of what the student accomplished, and with what level of skill, rather than a rather opaque letter grade.

Of course, that would make it tough to run "cattle car" courses with thousands of students being graded with multiple-choice tests. I don't think that would be a bad thing, either.