As stuffy as they generally are, academics crack me up sometimes. To explain:
Academic performance is frequently measured based on publications and citations.
A professor with many publications will be reviewed well.
A professor with many publications, some of which are cited very frequently by other authors' publications, is very likely to win tenure (or already has?).
Citations are the academic measure of influence, just as social networks' connectivity measures the same thing.
So there is a great incentive to publish as little as possible per paper, over as many papers as possible.
There is also a great incentive to induce others to have you cite them in your paper.
As a result, not all "influential" papers are at all substantial or useful, nor are all highly-cited authors influential (in the common sense).
Ok, that's just the academic part.
The journals know all this stuff. They sell subscriptions at ridiculous prices, so they have great interest in publishing a high proportion of the most "influential" material, in order that they can sell the most subscriptions, for as long as possible. Again, "influential" is measured, not necessarily authentic...
Established journals, that's fine. Ain't nobody complaining about Nature, or the New England Journal of Medicine. (Well, maybe; problems are problems, and everyone's got them. But it's not as systemic.) But suppose I were to simply create my own journal out of thin air? It should:
- Sound authoritative (have a good heady title, maybe something reminiscent; "Vermont Medical Proceedings Journal").
- Have lots of recognized authors, and lots of well connected ("influential", if not necessarily recognized) authors.
- Well advertised, on the internet, in magazines, I don't know... academic stuffs.
- Cost probably marginal: you don't want it priced fairly, because that would look cheap. Comparable to others would be fine. Pricing it higher than established journals might be a ballsy move too ("it must be worth it!!").
Easy enough, right? Well, you still need to get papers somewhere, but I'm sure enough people will submit entries for it. Top quality entries, that don't need to be proofed or anything. Yeah, about that...
Finally... Maybe it's not systemic. But it's still systemic. The owners of the top journals are doing business, like any other. And like any other business, it's in their best interest to maximize profit. They'll buy up dubious to trashy journals as long as they're profitable, and induce other established journals to dilute their product for the same end.
All in all... Is it right? No. Is it wrong? No. Business doesn't care about morally valued judgement, only money. That's capitalism, and that's evolution.
Now having said allllllllllll that... what amuses me about the process is... of course, academics, generally being a sharp bunch, are self-aware of their lot. They'd like to publish big and influential and revolutionary papers, but mostly they just need to survive, popping out small ones every so often. And they recognize the flaws in the typical citation-weighted method. So, randomly generated papers like these are one way to poke fun at that, and maybe achieve some change along the way. Any journal dumb enough to accept these deserves the ire they get. Presumably, those journals are aware of such attacks, so as with computer viruses and scanners, you get an evolutionary arms race between generators and detectors. The system works... in a sense.
Tim