The academic world has missed some decades of advancement of communication. In a world where all published science is open for meta-processing, the burden of validating science would shift to search engines. There would be search engines competing with scientific-SEO of course, but in the medium-run this would improve scientific writing, and possibly speed up science in general. In the end there will always be some private actors doing the work of "ranking" scientists. Academics are hanging on to the current peer-review journals precisely because they don't want to give that power to other actors.
