alt Hacker NewsThose 5 corporations have an achilles heel: reviewers. If the AI-driven science future has its way, the reviewers at all the major journals will collapse under the weight of submissions. The effect will be a denial-of-service, not unlike the one experienced by open source projects in the era of AI-driven pull requests.
An alternative to journals would be to switch to the arXiv model everywhere: let anyone publish with a bare minimum of moderation, make papers explicitly versioned, and let peer review happen out in the open. Already for decades, the importance of a paper has been measured by citations, not publication in a prestigious journal.