Why not Publish the Peer Reviews?

Here's the economic problem facing academic journals: an increasing percentage of the studies they publish are available for free on the Internet (sometimes in draft or revised form), while they charge exhorbitant fees per issue and even for buying individual articles over the Web. For now, university libraries are keeping them in business, but will they keep doing so forever?

Here's a proposed solution: Stop publishing academic studies, and start publishing the formerly private peer-reviews of those academic studies.

Any academic can publish anything he wants for free on the Internet, and this is increasingly happening with the proliferation of "working papers", etc. The service that journals provide, at least in theory, is a quality filter for academic studies. (Some don't even do that, but stay with me here.) So why don't journals 1) eliminate their paper versions altogether to cut costs 2) stop publishing studies 3) start publishing and charging for peer-reviews of the most interesting work in the field.

Just a thought.