I am sure it’s a dumb idea but why is there a problem for say the National Science Foundation or something to run a website that replicates ArXiv - if you are from an accredited university or whatever you can publish papers, fulfilling the “pdf store” function.
Then getting peer reviewed is a harder process but one can see some form of credit on the site coming from doing a decent reviewers job.
Given the last two years and what has been done to science funding, having a load bearing thing like ArXiv not housed with the U.S. government is, I think, pretty self-evidently a good idea.
Then getting peer reviewed is a harder process but one can see some form of credit on the site coming from doing a decent reviewers job.
I suspect I am missing a lot of nuance …