To add to your "who's going to be doing that independent reproduction?" point, the whole purpose of the journals is to communicate to the rest of the scientific

To add to your "who's going to be doing that independent reproduction?" point, the whole purpose of the journals is to communicate to the rest of the scientific community that there's an interesting result here that might want further examination. Sure, in the absence of the ability to disseminate your findings via the usual channel, you might be able to instruct your grad students to reproduce or beg one of your regular collaborators to reproduce, but then the independence of the experiments is dubious. And otherwise, academics aren't exactly searching for unpublished papers to replicate so the original can be published.