A thought I had: what if there were a service which maintained a list of arxiv identifiers (or, maybe also allow doi identifiers, but only if some extra conditions are met) that met their standards for notability/interesting-ness/quality (each URL could maybe be accompanied by the title and a list of the authors of the work).

And suppose that all this organization published, was this list of URLs (and titles and names).

It seems conceivable that, if their list became respected, getting one’s pdf on this list could, maybe (this seems a stretch) prestigious.

Now, if they accepted submissions of URLs to be considered for inclusion in a future issue of their public list of URLs, if being on this list was prestigious, they would presumably be flooded with submissions, and need to reduce the number of submissions they received somehow. Then, I imagine them charging some fee for submitting a URL for them to consider for evaluation.

Of course, they might include a few documents that no one submitted, in order to make sure the list remains useful by having most of the most relevant papers in whatever field, in order to maintain prestige.

Conceivably there could be multiple such organizations doing this for different fields and subfields.

If this happened, it would seem to be essentially a replication of the phenomenon of author-paid publication fees in academic journals, but without relying on copyright or actually doing the publishing of the articles.