> So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undiff

> So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling. That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an internet attention economy is a better state. In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass. All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review), and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the "attention economy" of the field. But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.