alt Hacker NewsElsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.
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anewhnaccount2 • today at 11:41 AM
The needle is beginning to move on this I believe: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00321-5
permo-w • today at 10:17 AM
Evil Seer would be a good anagram if only Elsevier did any of the actual [re]viewing themselves
This goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on.
Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here. There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better. Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth.
This also destroys the peer review system upon which many venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters. The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more.
Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have not really found anything better yet.