Peer Review Reform

Andrew Gelman has a couple of posts up on his blog about how to improve the peer review system.  I'd lean to towards a system modeled on the arxiv, as Larry Wasserman suggests. We're coming to the point where we can move beyond academic gatekeepers, and more towards a system where everything gets published and evaluated openly. Search algorithms will only get better, and publishing on the web is relatively cheap. Of course this means a lot of crap will get published, but that's not much different than the current system. PLoS One gets a fair amount of criticism for the quality of papers published there, but at least people approach articles published there with a critical eye. I think many academics are all to ready to accept research published in journals like Nature or Science at face value.