But this isn't a case of a journal acting like a "mafia". This is a case where something bad slipped past peer review, because of the inherent limitations of peer review. The reason is that expert time and attention is intrinsically scarce (if you double the number of experts, you double the number of papers produced, and hence double the amount of time that must be spent on peer review), and really properly vetting a paper takes a massive amount of time. This wouldn't be changed by system reform.

In my opinion, the best option for everybody who's serious about this is to read a lot of papers, until you become "well-calibrated", i.e. when you have a good handle on the overall chances a preprint is true, vs. a Twitter thread, vs. a paper in a top-tier journal. This has to be learned from experience. Reform doesn't change the fact that you need to do this -- it just adds yet another venue, either more or less reliable than the previous ones, that you also need to become calibrated on.

> read a lot of papers

In order to do this, those that are serious need to be able to access papers, but paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for Elsevier can put them out of reach.

Indeed, but that is the problem that preprints can solve. (As in, they don't solve the problem of telling what is correct, because that's just inherently hard, but they solve the problem of giving access so people can learn to tell.)

There is also the problem with cost and access. (Remember Aaron Swartz)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz