Right- academic papers are written for academicians who don't have any issues separating good papers and journals from bad. The fact that many journals have set themselves up as or allowed themselves to become part of the tenure and promotion metrics game, is more of an issue with tenure and promotion. If the requirement for simple metrics dissapeared, the fake papers would go away on their own. In any event, it's not really a problem for researchers.
Yup, that’s sums up the incentive for publishing so many papers and get citations.
Some professor put it in a nice way - the current system motivates us to think of research in terms of LPUs - least publishing units. No matter how established your lab is, you’d try to publish as soon as possible, leading to a lot of papers with not a lot of contribution. If tenure committees and all other systems that gauge academicians require people to say present their only top 3 or 5 seminal papers, then people would try to put their best work out there without the constant pressure of always publishing - win win for everyone. Unfortunately, the ones with the power to make these changes are the ones gaining the most in the current system so it’s unlikely to happen.
I mean it is a problem for researchers though. The blatantly fake paper mill ones (which seem to be the topic of this article anyway) aren't, but scientific fraud or even just minor misconduct from people that know how to mask it can waste a great deal of grant funding and scientist time to figure out.
Like look how many times that 2006 Nature paper on amyloid beta in Alzheimer's was cited, turns out some of the images were completely fabricated.
