With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are, what’s the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand.
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.
I'd assert it's not really a good start. The problem is largely rooted in scarcity - that there are very grants, and jobs, etc. that need to be competed for, and maybe it's worth it to you to overlook those couple outliers. You are after all pretty sure you're right, and they don't really mess anything up, and if you get this paper out, you'll have that good faculty job, and you'll do good work, etc...
Funding collapsing is just going to incentivize that. To be as competitive as possible for increasingly scarce resources. You won't be able to run that replication study, or document that code, or let a grad student spend six months chasing down that odd result, because the funding for all that just got cut.
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.