> We should rather tear down the awful system instead of playing whack-a-mole with academia's newest outcropping. There isn’t one “system” that can be torn dow

> We should rather tear down the awful system instead of playing whack-a-mole with academia's newest outcropping. There isn’t one “system” that can be torn down and replaced. A lot of these papers are coming from groups and institutions in foreign countries that are basically trying to role-play as researchers so they can blend in with actual researchers and try to reap the reputation and career rewards. It’s not really centralized. This is akin to suggesting that we need to tear down the entire “e-mail system” because spammers are abusing it to send spam appearing as legitimate email. Why is it a problem? Because these contribute nothing but noise and confusion to the field and make it more difficult for actual researchers to sort through real research. There is no reason to forgive these faux-researchers for trying to extract money and prestige from a system without making actual contributions. The idea to “tear down the system” doesn’t even make sense unless you propose something different. Are you suggesting we stop rewarding anyone in any way for research? That would remove the incentives, but now we have a problem that research isn’t rewarded at all and real researchers won’t do it because they need to eat.