You don't need publications of course, both are competing to own a social network and derive their strength from users that is the threat. An online ecosystem

You don't need publications of course, both are competing to own a social network and derive their strength from users that is the threat. An online ecosystem like Arxiv can very easily supersede a journal if they want to. For example Arxiv say could deploy a public peer review process i.e. reviews, criticisms and comments on the paper could be available next to paper in Arxiv without a lot of effort technically. Similarly curation and collation could easily taken up for free by community. Any of this would upend journals in quality or throughput easily. There are no problems journals solve that online cannot do better not even exclusivity they charge so much for. After all there are enough people to moderate reddit or do various quality control tasks in StackOverflow for not much benefit, researchers who curate on Arxiv could easily be found and they may even get a job boost. Building that community and acceptance is the hard part everything else is relatively trival. -- Open Access especially for government funded research should be mandatory. Same for software, any thing government invests to develop should be open source.