Could open peer review replace single-blind as the dominant form of peer-review for academic articles? What are the obstacles?

Thought experiment time. You're a young fledgling researcher at your first University. You are asked to peer review a paper for X (the Titan in your field). The manuscript is poorly written and the research is.. subpar. You know X is likely to sit on grant committees in your future, as well as review at least some of your manuscripts soon to head to journals. Do you provide a critical review and draw his ire, knowing you're correct, or do you give a glowing review and hope he passes the favor along? We can't play politics with peer review, it's shaky enough as it is. If anything I'd advocate for double BLIND peer review- where the work stands alone for judgement and is not bolstered or hindered by your status in the field. Until we have that peer review will always be a tad biased. Open review would be High School prom night.

The other answers sum up my opinion as well. I can see some good aspects of an open peer review system - not all reviewer comments are particularly valuable or even correct, and knowing who makes those stupid comments would be nice. Some reviewers can be bad by not even pretending to be objective, and an open peer review system would certainly weed them out. But those exceptional cases don't outweigh the benefits of anonymity in reviewing, as Justin English outlines in his answer. In fact, I would propose that instead of making the reviewers reveal themselves, the manuscript submitted to the reviewers should be anonymous. Make the entire process double-blinded, except for the journal editor. That would quell any personal feuds. But there is nothing wrong with experimenting with either model. I'd sign up for the open peer review one, since I like to put some effort in my reviewing.

The truth is that a few reviewers reading a paper can't really tell whether the paper offers a lasting contribution. Not in general. All reviewers can say is whether the paper looks correct. Hence, in practice, we do have open peer review. I mostly decide what to read based on what people have (openly) written. I often get useful pointers to papers through side-remarks (e.g, "this paper is brilliant work"). And it often take years before we know that a piece of work was worth reading... objects that without anonymity, people will avoid saying bad things about top scientists for fear of reprisal. However, I think that this objection is based on the wrong model. Indeed, in practice, almost all work is crap. Whatever you work on, there are probably too many papers in this area... and most of them are not worth reading. So, all you have to do is ignore bad work and say good things about solid work. The only case where you need to say bad things against other people's work... is when it is already well regarded, but on shaky grounds. This can be difficult, but the journal system does not make this particularly easy. Now... would journals based on open peer review work? Not as it currently work, no. What you could do is invite all researchers to post their work... wait a few years (say 5) and then select the well regarded paper and put them in a journal. Naturally, this would be too far from our current system to be workable (just think about grant applications and promotion cases).

I think most professional scientists would *prefer* not to know the identity of their reviewers, and there is no real point.  By the time an article has ready for publication, it's likely gone through several rounds of open review by colleagues of the scientist.

I think it is misleading to assume that most researchers will think highly of someone who reads their work uncritically and think less of a reviewer who correctly identifies flaws and suggests reasonable solutions.  I do agree with you that anonymity helps protect young researchers, but I also suspect that most young researchers suffer more from a surfeit of anonymity than a lack of it. That said, researchers always have the option of signing their reviews in an anonymous peer review system, a choice which would be lost in mandatory open review.  As a footnote, "Open" review is often used in a different context - publishing the reviews along with the paper (as practiced by peerJ, Nature EMBO, Biology Direct, others).  This can be anonymous or not.  Given the importance we place on the review process and the effort that goes into writing reviews, I think this is a valuable piece of the scholarly exchange that is largely wasted when invisible to the readers.

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