That's what Google and other search engines are for. arxiv.org even has its own search function. Nobody depends on journals for this.
> Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world?
No, just post it on a known website like arxiv.org. Then anyone with Internet access can get to it, and they don't even have to go to a library.
> If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way
You do have to have academic credentials to post papers on arxiv.org.
Not only that, but plenty of papers published in journals turn out to have been bogus--not just wrong (many papers published in good faith later turn out to be wrong, that's part of science) but based on faked data, and nobody in the journal review chain spotted it. So the supposed vetting that journals provide doesn't really add any value anyway.
> What if they lose their domain?
arxiv.org is supported by many academic institutions and foundations. They're not going anywhere.
> If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers?
By being arxiv.org or something like it. In other words, there is already an existing example of a non-publisher that addresses all the problems you say journal publishers address--and does it much better.
That's what Google and other search engines are for. arxiv.org even has its own search function. Nobody depends on journals for this.
> Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world?
No, just post it on a known website like arxiv.org. Then anyone with Internet access can get to it, and they don't even have to go to a library.
> If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way
You do have to have academic credentials to post papers on arxiv.org.
Not only that, but plenty of papers published in journals turn out to have been bogus--not just wrong (many papers published in good faith later turn out to be wrong, that's part of science) but based on faked data, and nobody in the journal review chain spotted it. So the supposed vetting that journals provide doesn't really add any value anyway.
> What if they lose their domain?
arxiv.org is supported by many academic institutions and foundations. They're not going anywhere.
> If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers?
By being arxiv.org or something like it. In other words, there is already an existing example of a non-publisher that addresses all the problems you say journal publishers address--and does it much better.