Or if the problem is bad papers, a fee that is returned unless it’s a universal strong reject.
Or if you don’t want to miss the best papers, a fee only for resubmitted papers?
Or a fee that is returned if your paper is strong accept?
Or a fee that is returned if your paper is accepted.
There’s some model that has to be fair (not a financial burden to those writing good papers) and will limit the rate of submissions.
Thoughts?
Go for the jugular. Impact the career of people putting out substandard papers.
Come up with a score for "citation strength" or something.
Any given bad actor with too many substandard papers to his/her credit begins to negatively impact the "citation strength" of any paper on which they are a co-author. Maybe even negatively impacting the "citation strength" of papers that even cite papers authored or co-authored by the bad actor in question?
If, say, the major journals had a system like this in place, you'd see everyone perk up and get a whole lot less careless.
Not sure that enough people understand that the vast vast majority of research papers are written in order to fulfil criteria to graduate with a PhD. It's all PhD students getting through their program. That's the bulk of the literature.
There was a time when nobody went to school. Then everyone did 4 years elementary to learn reading, writing and basic arithmetic. Then everyone did 8 years, which included more general knowledge. Then it became the default to do 12 years to get to the high school diploma. Then it became default to do a bachelor's to get even simple office jobs. Then it's a masters. Then to actually stand out now in a way that a BSc or MSc made you stand out, you need a PhD. PhD programmes are ballooning. Just as the undergrad model had to change quite a bit when it went from 30 highly-motivated nerds starting CS in a year vs. 1000. These are massive systems, the tens or hundreds of thousands of PhD students must somehow be pushed through this system like clockwork. Just for one conference you get tens of thousands of authors submitting similar amount of papers and tens of thousands of reviewers.
You can't simply halt such a huge machine with a few little clever ideas.
While the growth in the number of new PhDs has been modest, the number of published papers has grown much faster. I would attribute that to changes in administrative culture. Both the government and the universities have become driven by metrics, which means everyone must produce something the administrators can measure.
The first question is what scientific research is actually for. Is it merely for profitable technological applications? The Greek or the humanistic or the enlightenment ideal wasn't just that. Fundamental research can be its own endeavor, simply to understand more clearly something. We don't only do astronomy for example in order to build some better contraption and understanding evolution wasn't only about producing better medicine. But it's much harder to quantify elegance or aesthetics of an idea and its impact.
And if you say that this should only be a small segment, and most of it should be tech-optimization, I can accept that, but currently science runs also on this kind of aesthetic idealist prestige. In the overall epistemic economy of society, science fills a certain role. It's distinct from "mere" engineering. The Ph in PhD stands for philosophy.