  Today's peer review process for scientific articles is unnecessarily opaque
and offers few incentives to referees. Likewise, the publishing process is
unnecessarily inefficient and its results are only rarely made freely available
to the public. Here we outline a comparatively simple extension of arXiv.org,
an online preprint archive widely used in the mathematical and physical
sciences, that addresses both of these problems. Under the proposal, editors
invite referees to write public and signed reviews to be attached to the posted
preprints, and then elevate selected articles to "published" status.
