Whether peer review is broken or not is not the problem highlighted in this article. This professor is publishing in junk journals that are not rigorous and are pay to play. I receive offers for these SPAM journals in the tens to hundreds everyday that somehow skip my inbox. The problem highlighted in this article is about why Cornell is not doing something about this professor.
This is just an extreme form of what is in fact common practice in the academic world. There are a lot of second and third rate publications that aren't completely horrible that happily accommodate a lot of mediocre articles peddled by mediocre professors on behalf of their mediocre graduate students. We don't all get to publish Nobel prize winning articles in Nature.
Universities are typically more concerned with their professor's abilities to raise funding than their academic integrity. If the numbers look good (money coming in, publications going out) they are not likely to complain or apply much scrutiny. Their assumption here is that peer review should be sufficient. As I was arguing it is not. So that is in fact the core problem. Universities don't care, reviewers don't care, journal editors don't care, publishers don't care. They all benefit from inflated numbers. The system does not work. Cornell is complicit here and part of the problem.
If this was the case then I'd see these low tier / scam journals in the cv's of my colleagues. I do not. Perhaps this is only because I am at a well respected/ranked institution. In terms of funding, NIH for example, only has you list 4 or 5 most important publications in your biosketch..so quality, not quantity would matter there in terms of securing funding.
Yes, lower tier (but not scam journals) can be the homes of lower quality work, but most often they are there because 1)it is a journal for a subdiscipline (Child Development, for example), 2)useful but not groundbreaking research (e.g., establishing validity of lab's protocol), or 3)research that was conducted well, but the results were not clear or are complicated.
The latter is what often irks me the most about science: The need for clear results to get in a good journal. The journal quality should be determined not on results but on the quality of methods and research questions. That is why I am a proponent of pre-registration.
