“Publishers” really should be “journal”. In the past many journals were run and published by professional societies. They had to deal with printing costs. The reviewing and editing is largely volunteer work still. Nowadays a professional society could easily handle the costs of a couple of staff editors and provide only digital copies. But it seems many/most professional societies sold out their journals to Elsevier. The idea of a traceable blockchain scoring and journal would be great. Journals and professional societies are largely about informal relationships in a research community for better or worse. Being able to track this in a blockchain could be helpful in bringing scrutiny and transparency in cases like the “Alzheimer’s Plaque Cabal” which is currently hidden from scrutiny.

The publishers are a fake authority, any legitimacy comes from the peer review. To underline and accentuate this I think one should make the review process public (with anonymous reviewers). And at publication time, also publish the name of the reviewers (possibly just a list, unconnected to the review comments). This way reviewers actually have a personal stake in the quality of a paper. Don't want your name associated with the recommendation of a bad/flawed paper. And on good papers, its nice to get actually some credit for doing the tedious review work.