I'd be happy to pioneer it on LW if it was a simple enough algorithm. StackOverflow, MathOverflow, Quora, possibly Reddit might be quite interested if it worked. (I don't know if there's acknowledged borrowing - keeping in mind that we borrowed all of Reddit's code in the first place and it was under an open-source give-back license - but Reddit seems to have adopted LW's highlight-recent-comments innovation, so there's been some backflow.) Wikipedia is disintegrating under the weight of deletionists and would probably have to be rebooted more than healed, but Earth needs a Wikipedia. There are plenty of likely adopters / testers / provers in advance of the general scientific community if a superior karma algorithm can be found.

But then again, there may be many more scientists disillusioned with the academic journal system than I think.

At least in mathematics my impression is that there are a lot. The Cost of Knowledge boycott against Elsevier has about 13,000 signatures at the moment. Discussion of this kind of issue in the mathematical community has been happening for awhile now, most prominently at places like Tim Gowers' and Terence Tao's blogs, but also on Google Plus.