We are not aiming to replacing the publishing companies. We focus instead to strengthen science communication and popularization by giving incentives to researchers to write in layman terms about what they are doing and providing the information on Steem. This is a different story compared with what you suggest.
Changing the way research publishing works is actually on-going, with some fields being (much much much more in advanced than others. Publishers have also started to change their way of working. It is still not clear to me what could be the role of Steem here. There were discussions on that in the past (you can check the pevo project for instance) and the way SteemSTEM evolves may retrigger them in the future. However, oe step at a time :)
Very good. Thanks for the clarification, @lemouth. I might have to resume blogging again. I frequently run across research papers that are fairly interesting, and it's fun writing up summaries that put things into layman's terms and also show how each discovery fits into the "big picture."
Feel free to do that. We are encouraging many things at SteemSTEM, and especially what you propose.