We're not talking about a diseased animal, we're talking about people who are making conscious decisions knowing what the results will be. I can and so absolutely blame people for that.
Your metaphor insinuates that Republicans are unable to control their actions. If that were the case, that's all the more reason to vote and get them out of positions of power.
I know little of the ins-and-outs of scientific publishing, but that didn't stop me from having a dumb thought: could the fediverse be a potential solution? Each university or research group could host their own instance of some software specifically for publishing papers, papers can cross-link citations to papers on other instances, people can make comments across instances that are tied to their own identities from their home instance, paper revisions can be tracked easily and bad citations spotted when a paper is updated or retracted, that kind of thing. The currency then becomes the reputation of the organizations and individuals, and this opens up a ton of data for automated analysis. I just don't know enough to know what problems would arise.