The recent postings to this list about rejection rates and costs of peer review point out yet another way that costs can be lowered: Elimination of the wasteful duplication in the peer review system.
It is widely acknowledged that almost all articles are published eventually, possibly after some revisions, and often after getting rejected by first and second choice journals. Thus several sets of referees have to go over essentially the same material. If we moved to a system of explicit quality feedback, with referees and editors providing their evaluations of the correctness, novelty, and significance to the readers (beyond the current system, where readers never see any negative evaluations, and see positive ones only to the extent of knowing that a published paper met some quality hurdle that is not well formulated, much less known), we could get away from all this duplication. Unfortunately a change of this type is likely to take far longer to achieve than open archiving, since it involves changing the basic patterns of scholarly communication. Andrew Odlyzko