I don't think it's academia not taking it seriously, more like these publishers are just coasting on brand name and trying to milk every cent out of it. Peer review is essentially being a Reddit mod or something, you get nothing out of it but karma or a sticker, and the platform/publisher gets all the benefit.

Imagine being an author and paying to publish your novel. Also btw the editor is another author but has to proofread your book for free.

Many academics will publish preprints or their more popular papers on their own websites etc. It's just common sense because to academics they don't get paid a single cent by the publisher (and instead have to pay the publishers instead) and more publicity for them is always better than less.

Validating existence should already be trivial: virtually all journal already have publicly-available indices which contain at least author information and an abstract. Combine that with DOI citations and you're basically done - even with closed-access journals.

Checking the content is of course a lot more difficult, but that doesn't magically become trivial with open-access journals: you still need to read and interpret what is being said in the paper and compare it to the claims being made in the citation. Granted, these days you could use AI for a first pass, but it's still going to be incredibly tedious work.

> This is a side effect of academia never taking open accessibility to papers and journals seriously.

From my perspective, it's a clear manifestation of humanity's most pervasive failing - the one that defines every group, eventually.

    No One Anywhere Wants To Clean Their Own House.

It is trivially easy to validate the existence of a cited paper.