NeuroDojo: One weird trick that would kill predatory journals

"The main reason that junk journals can fool people (even some in relatively sophisticated academic environments in an industrialized nation) is that they can claim to be peer-reviewed. There is no simple way to know if a journal is peer reviewed, because those critical pre-publication reviews are normally confidential.

My 'not at all novel' solution for how we could kill off junk journals is: Publish the reviews. Just the content of the review, not necessarily the identity of the reviewers. I don’t want to wade into the “signed” versus “anonymous” peer reviews right now. The goal is to demonstrate that the paper received substantive review, not who did it. Real journals have the reviews to publish. Junk journals will have no reviews they can publish. The effort spent generating plausible fake reviews seems to be far too high for a junk journal to keep up the charade for long. With that one change, whether a journal is truly peer reviewed (or not) is easily verifiable. 

There have been many other people who have called for publishing reviews to be a more normal part of the publication process. There are many reasons to do this, but possibly shooting a poison dart in the direction of junk journals would be a nice side benefit."