[bee_rider]

This seems... ambitious.

I think ArXiv (edit: Actually this is not by ArXiv, but some other group) is drastically over-estimating the desire to submit papers to their service. They are popular because they host the documents you were going to produce, in the format that the journals expect. The production of a Arxiv appropriate document is a side effect of the actual job, which is writing a paper to submit to a journal (hey, I'm as unhappy as you are that this is the actual job, but everyone hates publish-or-perish, if it could be overthrown it would have been).

"Getting academics to act in a way that is not directly in their self-interest because they just love sharing information" is a usually a pretty safe bet, but I think this would be a bit too far. Unless ArXiv can somehow get journals to expect their format (good luck!) I think this is going to be hard.

[stncls]

The article is not at all by the arXiv people. This is just a paper submitted to arXiv (about arXiv). The confusion is understandable, because the link is to arXiv's experimental HTML5 viewer, not the usual format (which would be: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020).

The authors are from Authorea.com, a for-profit that wants to replace arXiv.

Edit: Aside from that, fully agree with you. Good luck to them.

[bee_rider]

Ah, thanks for the correction, that really changes things!