I'm not the asker of the question, but I have a MeFi account and will both point her to these comments, and will collate responses and repost over there. Thanks! - Chris Miller

In my opinion, it's essential that the entire peer review process is attributed to real-names and is fully published. Basically the opposite of standard anonymous peer-review. Readers can see the originally submitted manuscript; communications between editor, referees, and authors; referee reports; author responses; and all iterations of this, up through the final manuscript. In my opinion, if it doesn't do this, then it's not awesome :) - Steve Koch

Published yes; real names no. I sign all my reviews but I'm a failure anyway in academic terms, and I'm just plain ornery besides. You're never going to get full and frank review when the reviewer is scared of the reviewee. Give the reviewers the option to remain anonymous. - Bill Hooker

Hey Bill, I strongly disagree, though I do get your point. Anonymous review leads to lazy review. Attributed review leads to real & honest review. Let's consider a famous lab submitting a careless and flawed paper. I think most scientists would not choose kissing ass over pointing out errors. Instead, they will choose from: (A) having huevos to shred the paper, (rare) (B) figuring out how to tactfully point out the mistakes (sometimes) (C) declining to review at all (common / for fear of retaliation). The editor should have a rule that if x number of reviewers decline to review, then the paper is returned to the original authors. I think this would have the effect of dramatically increasing the frequency of potential referees declining review, and ultimately lead to a whole lot fewer crappy papers sliding through peer review. - Steve Koch

Furthermore, I think that even if the paper ends up not being reviewed, the journal should post the original submission. This would really make authors ask the question, "is this really what I think is the final version?" I'd say 1/2 the papers I review appear to have been hastily submitted with the understanding that it's likely they'll be able to continue doing experiments and submit a major revision after review. That's a huge waste of my time. And I'd like to get credit for pointing out the necessary controls, citations, and analyses that they end up doing. - Steve Koch

Steve - when you propose "The editor should have a rule that if x number of reviewers decline to review, then the paper is returned to the original authors.", you add another burden on manuscripts that cross disciplinary boundaries or other lines of traditional thought. Anonymous reviews that are not made public tend to lead to laziness but if the original manuscript plus the reviews plus the reply to the reviewers are all public, anonymity does not seem to have this effect. For some journals which already use such a system, see http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/ and http://www.biogeosciences.net/ . - Daniel Mietchen

One way to awesomeness could be to integrate the papers with existing knowledge much more than is current habit - drop the "List of references" in favour of direct hyperlinks (also to the raw data) whose targets are archived in a standard fashion (e.g. via http://www.webcitation.org/ ), integrate/ embed multimedia and 3D content, provide one version of an article "as is", while making another editable by anyone registered with their real names, such that errors can be fixed and the context can be updated as new research comes in or is replicated. Make it machine-readable. - Daniel Mietchen

I don't like being a wet blanket but while I applaud the enthusiasm, looking at the original question most of this has been tried in one form or another already. These things generall fail when they are trying too much to be like a journal but they also fail when they don't look enough like a journal because people can't see any value in submiting good work to them. I think there are three or four similar iniatives out there at the moment driven mostly by people who think it can be done "for free" (which it can, but only if they are willing to work full time on it without pay unfortunately) - Cameron Neylon

I would take this: http://sciphu.com/ and make it better :-) Best of luck ! at some point one of these initiatives needs to succeed. - Nils Reinton

Make sure to let authors keep the copyright and make it clear to everyone that it is indeed peer-reviewed so that no flags will be raised when listed on CVs - Jean-Claude Bradley