You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is done in general.
in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward.
but instead of everyone cooperating to do just that, they are competing with each other, and try to outdo each other. a lot of energy is wasted in preventing others from stealing your research ideas and being the first to publish on a particular topic. instead of looking at the benefits of the research published in a paper, and whether the results can be reproduced, instead what matters more is how many citations the paper can get.
reputation has become more important than producing actual results. academics and academic institutions are measured not in the quality of their research, but in the amount of papers and citations they can produce, to the point that researchers who can't dedicate their life to their work, because they have family, or worse, are a single parent, can't get a job, let alone tenure, because they can't put in the time required even though they may well put in more effort than others into the time they do have.
so yes, i acknowledge that changing this is going to be extremely hard. but it looks to me like changing the way papers are published will be the easiest step, because the components that actually matter are distribution, which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics.
the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics?
how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top. the citation count can be included in the score too.
greetings, eMBee.