In my understanding, the most valuable service academic journals provide is peer review. If reviewers start accepting online submissions, people could simply send them links to their online articles hosted on their site or blog. Content would be licensed under the CC-BY-SA. If it passes peer review, the journal would simply link to it and also provide a PDF copy. Journals would become a directory of peer reviewed works.
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The most valuable (or at least: the reason we're still paying them) service academic journals provide is being able to categorise academics as having published in those journals. There are plenty of journals that provide perfectly fine peer review, but that are not as important as other journals because they don't have their brand name.
In other words: for many disciplines, the potential replacements providing peer review, archival and distribution are already there. The main thing a replacement system will have to find out is how to determine who to give grants, tenure, etc.
(Disclaimer: I'm working on a project that hopes to achieve that.)
Any chance you can post a link to what you are working on? Does it involve a PageRank like system?
It's in my profile, the link is https://plaudit.pub
It's not currently that interesting to the average HN reader though. The idea is to allow researchers to give each other recognition explicitly, ideally replacing the recognition of "being published in journal x". Since researchers already have a reputation in their academic community, we figured that we could leverage that as a counterweight to the indirect reputation that journals currently have.
We do so by integrating with preprint servers and publishers, providing a widget that allows researchers to endorse the research they're reading. The first integrations are set to launch at the start of 2019, so until then there's not much to play with.
That said, the PageRank-like system you might be looking for could just be the h-index? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
Good stuff, thanks for the h-index link, I'll take a look. I've seen something similar, SCImago Journal Rank, but I think that is only for the journal, not the individual. I really like the idea of moving away from the idea of a journal brand as the ranking of importance.
Has AI been applied to academic journal peer review yet? It seems like this might be a significant use case.