This is a nifty idea. The only problem I see with it is that it makes papers far less self-contained. IMO some of the best-written papers let you understand something of their impact even if you're not too familiar with the field. Taking away the lit review hurts that.

You might argue that a single collaborative lit review would do -- so readers could just print out that plus the paper. But often that lit review section is tailored to your specific goals and audience. To do it well, I think you'd end up having hundreds of such lit reviews for a given topic. In which case, why even bother?

(I didn't mean to sound so harsh, by the way! I do quite like the idea of bringing some of software's collaborative tools over to research.)

Yea that's true. And I even enjoy that self-contained aspect of papers, especially when I'm reading up on an unfamiliar field. But perhaps they could be more high-level.

Some authors go crazy. Say for instance, by explaining philosophy-of-mind concepts in an addiction paper.

+1 to github-style journal.

Also there is "The Self Journal of Science" that aims to fix peer-review and exterminate bad publishing habits --- http://sjscience.org/

And my marginal, but an open source project --- http://papers-gamma.link

Also you have PKP, that even organises a conf about this stuff http://pkp.sfu.ca/pkp2015

Ideally the lit review is less a review and more of an outline of the current state of knowledge and, most importantly, where the gaps are (that this paper fills!). In practice you're often correct though, the lit review is more "look at all the papers I read".