This has always been a problem, and "trusting papers written by people I know, or who have worked with people I know" has always been an adequate solution for p

This has always been a problem, and "trusting papers written by people I know, or who have worked with people I know" has always been an adequate solution for people in the field, whatever the field is. But with the democratization of scientific communication in the Internet Age, as well as the massive over-production of people with PhDs in the sciences relative to the number of academic jobs available, the number of accessibility of bogus publications has skyrocketed at the same time as the pressure to use them has increased enormously. Meanwhile, the amount of good science has stayed pretty much constant, so the good/total ratio is dropping precipitously. So while insider information is still effective for us, it's much less so for others, and in particular the popular science press <em>and the majority of the people who read it</em> are interested entirely in page views on the one hand and being wooed by the "next amazing breakthrough!" on the other, rather than anything to do with actual science. There was a comic someplace (should be xkcd but doesn't seem to be) saying of the average reader if "IFLScience" and similar sites, "You don't love science, you just want to look at its ass as it walks by." This is not the worst of all possible worlds (in other places they want science to never show its face in public, much less its ass) but it does create an environment where science communication is hard, and the proliferation of bogus journals and people willing to publish in them is problematic. It wouldn't hurt for hiring committees to have an explicit rule that anyone who has published in a problematic journal has that publication counted against them, but mostly there needs to be some better form of triage than conventional peer review (which is weak enough as it is) or we're going to drown in papers debating the number of angels than can dance on the head of a pin, and lose that one weird trick that discovered by a post-doctoral mom that actually solves an interesting problem.