The alternative is open post-publication peer review: any scientist that reads a paper in her/his field of expertise may act as a reviewer and publish a rating or review of that paper.

The end result does not create more work for the reader, as something like the average of ratings received by a paper gives in many cases more information than just the name of the journal where it has been published. For example, this Nature paper currently has a rating of 2% on Epistemio, although it has been published in the prestigious Nature: http://www.epistemio.com/p/Jr3gS9VW .

The journal name is a too weak information as compared to individual ratings of papers, as the distribution of the quality of papers from a given journal is very skewed.

See also the papers in http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/resear...