eLife, a renowned open-access Journal, is conducting an experiment in Academic publishing

A respected life-science and biomedical journal eLife is conducting an exciting experiment in Academic publishing. They will publish 300 submissions, which were deemed by editors of sufficient merit to go through the external peer-review, regardless of the review outcome. They wrote: "The decision to send a manuscript to external referees for peer review will be tantamount to accepting it for publication." The paper will be published together with all reviewers comments, authors replies and possible modification to the original text of figures. 

The hope is that:  "by removing the gatekeeping role of reviewers, the peer review process can focus on how the work can be strengthened." They also suggest that the novel publishing approach would shift a focus of research evaluation (of individual researchers work or of the entire organisations) from a journal´s brand as a proxy of scientific quality to the actual discussion of results and ideas. The third potential benefit is the efficiency of the Academic publishing as a whole - often the manuscripts rejected by one journal are published with modifications by another magazine. But the time and resources were wasted along the road.

 More details of this trial can be found here.

A strategy that is employed by F1000Research is similar in spirit but different in execution. They offer an immediate publication of the submitted manuscripts, eliminating a potential editorial bias, opening it up for expert reviews and for public commenting. After the open peer-review process, a manuscript can be accepted and therefore indexed in databases like Pubmed, Scopus, among others. The papers that did not pass this post-publication peer-review remain published and can be referenced to but they will not be indexed in the public databases. However, it is unclear who decides what papers are scientifically sound and merit the acceptance. Is it done by peer-review consensus or does an editor have a say?

Yet another system combines peer-review with a post-publication one and is employed at Cureos, a medical journal. The system calculates Scholarly Impact Quotient (SIQ) that is based on scores given to a paper by both the designated referees and by the readers.