They'll only do it if the customers demand it. But the customers are universities, if they cared they could just fix the problem at the source by auditing and v

They'll only do it if the customers demand it. But the customers are universities, if they cared they could just fix the problem at the source by auditing and validating studies themselves. They don't need to pay third parties to do it. Journals often don't have sufficient lab access to detect fraud anyway. I do think the journal ecosystem can just disappear and nobody would care. It only exists to provide a pricing mechanism within the Soviet-style planned economy that academia has created. If that's replaced by a different pricing mechanism academic publishing could be rapidly re-based on top of Substack blogs and nothing of value would be lost.