This sounds more like textbooks.
Journals are usually intended to be venues for experts to talk to each other, not even "professionals in the field".
There are some journals (sometimes called "translational") that try to bring scientific results into practice, though these are often limited to fields where "practice" is its own huge body of knowledge that doesn't always overlap with "research" in that field (e.g., Medicine).
This made sense when communication was slow and the back and forth of discourse could take weeks to months. But publishing your work in a way that thousands of other readers can consume it is easier now that it's been ever, so it stands to reason that sharing the results of scientific works may yield better outcomes if it takes on a different form.
It's a potentially important claim
Peer review is just a sanity check. Authors and scientists and studies and papers are important or not independent of the peer review process.
Peer review often fails to catch cheaters, too, as the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön case demonstrated (from 2000-2001 the Bell Labs researcher published 9 papers in Science and 7 in Nature, all of which made it through peer review, all of which were later retracted on grounds of fraudulent data manipulation). In the long run, the scandal did improve the field, as all publications on microelectronic graphite etc. devices now require electron microscopy proof that the claimed devices actually exist. Note current AI technology allows for data fraud and image manipulation that's much harder to detect than in the past, though.
In some circles, the two first pieces of feedback on a paper draft, from a nominal co-author:
1. Cite [my people's various loosely related work].
2. Cite [particular researcher in this niche], who'll probably be a reviewer.
Einstein for example had public resistance to his theory of relativity in the beginning.
More recently, it took years for the medical community to get over its opposition to the evidence that common peptic ulcers are caused by bacteria (which earned two Aussie physicians the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine). [0] A NY Times correspondent (and physician) wrote in 2002, "I’ve never seen the medical community more defensive or more critical of a story."
(Much of the opposition was interest-based, e.g., surgeons who didn't want to lose lucrative fees for operating on ulcer patients who could instead be treated with inexpensive antibiotics without the pain and recovery time of major surgery.)
[0] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2005/7693-the-nob...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_peptic_ulcer_disea...
Therefore the recent super conductivity papers may well end up being very important, if only to stir up the community to action.
> Every time some one comes up with grants for reproducing published stuff the silly idea finds enthusiastic support.
suggests that you think replication isn't useful. Or, am I misunderstanding what "the silly idea" refers to?
Don’t use them as the basis for rewards.
Don’t use them as the basis for policy
If they are nothing more than the the starting conversation of scientists then we should not put much value in them.
Let’s not play the have it both ways game where scientific papers are given deference and then when there is cheating just say li g that scientific papers are just a conversation starter.
What about the use of papers as metrics for advancing in academic careers?
Career advancement could be based on market forces (e.g., productive researcher on something valued, if they're not given a sweet enough deal by one university, another university can snap them up). But how do buyers in the market get the information about how valuable a given researcher is? (Word of mouth? CV summary without pubs list? Job talks? Interviews? Twitter?)