Peer review works by deleting content

It's a bit hard to define what an academic peer review is. A good starting point for providing an answer is to compare different kinds of existing reviews in other domains. One example is the deletion debate in Wikipedia, another well working system is the review section in Stackoverflow and last but not least a peer reviewed academic paper is working with the same principle.

Let us go through the examples step by step to emphasize the inner working. In Wikipedia and Stackoverflow as well the idea is, that an admin deletes an article from the system and before he can do so, he needs 4 or more users who pressed the deletion button as well. What the group is allowed to do is to collectively identify and remove unwanted content. Somebody may ask why this make sense, if the server space of the Wikipedia is large enough for holding all information. The reason for deleting content is given by the quality requirements.

An academic paper is working by the same principle. A group of people decides in a voting which content gets deleted. The result is always the same. The original author of the Wikipedia article, the Stackoverflow question and the academic paper will become upset. A deletion is an escalating process which produces a conflict. Because of this reason, a deleting voting will split the community. Somebody argues pro deletion, while other are trying to safe the content.

To simplify the description it make sense to focus only on a technical side. In the Internet age, all the content is stored in a SQL database. Removing an entry from the overall table needs administrator privilege. If the post or the paper was deleted, it is no longer available on the webserver. The bottleneck for the overall decision process is, that some users are available which are voting for deletion and other users have to submit content which gets deleted.

With this background knowledge in mind, it's possible to describe a generalized academic journal. What is needed is the ability to create new user accounts, to submit new content and to vote for deletion of old content.