Academic Publishing, Talking Frogs, and Nailing Your Head to the Floor
The Answer Is Transaction Costs
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How to Make Your Publications Worth Counting
The problem is that deans, some of them at least, and other academic administrators can count, but they can't really read. So instead of judging the quality of research and scholarship, they count the number of publications. The prestige of the journal, like the honor of getting to whitewash Tom Sawyer's fence, is the reward. Most papers don't get published; if they do, there was a process of revision that took months or years of tedious and largely pointless changes. All this is foisted on the authors who are providing almost nothing in the first place.
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