A rating system would generally become an indicator of other academics&#x27; <i>level of agreement</i> with a paper, rather than an indication that it passed a quality and significance threshold. Citation ranking schemes already exist, but the citation counts are heavily influenced by academics being unable to NOT mention a dissenting view because it was recently published in a prominent journal. And I&#x27;m not sure examples like Amazon book ratings, HN karma or professionally-optimized PageRank can really be claimed with a straight face to be superior for curating quality content than good old fashioned peer review.<p>I do think open commenting systems would be a boon to academic discourse though.