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 :)