Otherwise I can just tell you my opinion as someone who works in academia: It makes perfect sense, and so far I haven't met anyone who was able to offer any better alternative to peer reviewing.
That being said, there are some reasons why there are more shady papers and journals today than there used to be.
The #1 reason is that many policy makers and science administrators got this unhealthy obsession with merely counting indicators, which leads young researchers to chase publication after publication regardless of the quality.
The #2 reason is that there are way more researchers competing for tenure, but jobs have barely increased and public spending on education and universities are overall low in comparison to other areas. You get what you pay for.
So there you go, another opinion, but at least a qualified one.
I think Nassim Taleb does the best jobs at explaining the general mechanism of the problem: https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...
Consider how much more approachable a DEF CON talk is as compared to a research paper. What if we promulgated biological research in a similar fashion. Chubbyemu [1] explains diseases in a very approachable fashion. Perhaps we could do more do make research and academia approachable for the average person?
TL;DR: I think the issue is the need to demystify academia, peer review is only a part of that.
The fact nobody has ever suggested public-review on-top of peer review makes me think academia really doesn't think about this issue much at all.
Peer review as such does not provide much of a signal as to how important a paper is or a binary "good paper"/"bad paper" decision; ideally, it's a process that helps maintain a certain standard. Conference proceedings typically don't use this process, but (more or less) ask for a simple yes/no (or a 1-5 rating where everyone knows that it's going to be rejected if you don't give a high enough rating because of a 30% acceptance rate etc.).
Or is this the first day you're on the internet?
Reminds me of a time when this person in my field decided to move its most popular wiki to Wikipedia and delete the wiki site. Well it resulted in the wiki site being gone, and a bunch of scattered Wikipedia pages with no content because it was way too much trouble to get the Wikipedia editors to change the content so that it will be actually informative.
I don't mean to be rude....I actually fuck that. I mean to be rude. You are an irrefutable argument against public-review.
There are not only such suggestions, there is even a whole research discipline solely dedicated to evaluating peer reviewing, and there is a metric ton of papers about the topic written by disciples from many different areas.
How do you define "public-review" for that to be a fact?
That goes way too far. There are plenty of areas where great work is being done. But yes, there are some where bad work is done. And a lot of the people that talk about science in public have an agenda and they get heard over the people who do real science.
You could say the same stuff about the historical priesthood. For ages, knowledge, and science were cultivated by priests. They were the ones that could read, write, they hand-copied books, they advised rules, helped peasants, took care of sick, poor and so an so.
Which doesn't invalidate my critique about the corruption. The mechanisms are exactly the same.
I only chose to respond because I found the “priestly caste” analogy to be utterly without foundation, but yet presented as if it was full of insight.
My point is that there is foundation in the public mind (which is almost certainly what the above poster was referring to).,
But let's pursue this line of thinking. Your claim is that significant elements of the public scorn professors because they are perceived as, and act as, an elitist caste. I call BS on this as well. A large segment of academia is very devoted to public outreach, including by pop science TV/youtube, press releases, free in-person and video lectures, public outreach, blogging, and posting papers on arxiv. This is the best of academic culture.
A sensible person can take advantage of this wealth of free knowledge. A bigoted person can invent some kind of culture war and play out stick figures in their head.
I come from people who had greatly varying degrees of education. Many didn't go to college, some failed out. A couple are (or were, RIP) sometimes bigoted towards people who have specialized expertise and training, but aside from those very few, the vast majority have respect for specialized knowledge in general, and academia in particular.
I think it does a great disservice to the common sense of that vast majority of non-academics, to suppose they are bigoted towards academia because of some kind of culture war stereotype.