Honestly, it sounds like a good idea but would be unlikely to work. Hiring and tenure decisions are mostly based on publications and grant funding (for tenure). There's too much of a vested interest in getting as many papers published as possible, and even with the current respected journals, there have been terrible problems with fake peer review.
Research, like education, has become a field driven by industrial metrics that create incentives to do the wrong thing. Education has an obsession with test scores. Research has an obsession with things "journal impact factors," number of citations per paper, and "altmetric" scores.
Yes, granted, there is a ton of inertia within academic circles on HR, and the system is rife with incentive problems. You get no argument from me there.
It takes an institutional push to overturn poor hiring and tenure review incentive systems, but it can be done. The dean of one of my alma maters successfully lobbied with the president of the university for an exception to the publishing/teaching/service splits of assessment. He wanted autonomy over hiring and promotion within his faculty as independent from the university's senior brass because--experience was showing--the formula was causing retention and promotion of people who looked good on paper, but were functionally only incremental innovators, and who developed a weak alumni network. This wasn't a podunk university, it was prominent.
The journals are much the same. I see them as operating somewhere between the roles of an esteemed university and a professional governing body, like a college of physicians, in terms of verifying quality. The question then becomes one of supply management, to ensure that the pool of quality research isn't unduly diluted by unscrupulous academics and researchers trying to pad their performance reviews. Fair point. Again, like the tenure re-negotiations, I see it as a hairy--but still achievable--goal.
Then the challenge becomes a solvable constrained optimization auction problem, where you're effectively auctioning off the right to publish in a "good" journal. Instead of auctioning out journal space on the basis of dollars, it's faculty time used for review/editing. You could constrain the supply of journals by matching them on labour intensity to peer review in reputable journals. Reviewers could be chosen based on prior publication rates, weighted by journal quality. (You could even adjust for crappy journal publications by discounting their conversion factor.) Because each reviewer has a finite 24 hours a day, and you can enforce leisure time and a fixed review rate on a given reviewer in your supply management algorithm, you can cap each reviewer's effective quality-adjusted supply of journal access.
The enforcement mechanism behind all this would require some contract by signatory participating universities that would include withdrawal of review and publishing privileges in the event of *ahem* impropriety. You could extend the memberships on a university-department affiliation basis, so that universities are then competing across two dimensions--ethics AND quality--with the best candidates presumably preferring some combination where the two qualities are strongly represented. (Maybe I'm Polyanna-ish there?)
No, I see this as being far more influential than just simply making access to research cost-free. It's about removing the capitalist incentives behind publishing garbage research and nullifying some of the perverse incentive systems that have crept into *what should be* a system built on the pursuit of truth and knowledge.
You get nothing but agreement from me that the existing system is rife with challenges, so it's refreshing to have a discussion about how to fix it!
