We already publish in journals that ‘garner’ negative reviews; we don’t get to see the review scores. Editors already comment on papers, and we don’t see their comments. Everyone knows that some mediocre papers are accepted and some excellent papers are sandbagged behind the scenes, for less than honorable reasons. Maybe publishing the reviews and editorial comments would shed some valuable light?

Why wouldn’t tenure and grant committee members take into account high review scores in a journal that has high status and maintains an excellent review system? As long as eLife can maintain their status, maybe this could be a model for a positive change in science publishing, without making it any harder for people to get tenure, promotions, or grants?

Side note, it seems like this thinking that we need to have peer validation gate-keeping the publishing process is part of the reason for the reproducibility crisis; the reason nobody dares writing reproduction papers is because it’s so hard to get them published. Could help if journals accepted these by default?