Senior researchers don’t want to publish there, but feel pressured to help their trainees get jobs by publishing there.

Trainees don’t want to publish there, but feel pressured to publish there if we want jobs.

A negative feedback loop is exactly what we need to get rid of it, and switch to other possibilities (like wiki-type review online).

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how we can break the cycle, unless senior researchers could be induced to stop including themselves on author lists (even when they have contributed next to nothing but their reputations).

I’d rather see a shift to junior researchers publishing independently, acknowledging but their advisors but not giving them all the credit. Then maybe the pressure to publish in certain journals would lessen if the job market would learn to value different qualities in applicants.

If the journal world is slowly eroding, as it seems it is, and if scholarship moves to publication in repositories of various types, new methods of assessing the quality of content will need to develop, which more closely assess a single work, rather than the packaging (in this current case, the journal). This will need to happen for two reasons: the first being the assessment and review process, particularly tied to tenure. The second is tied to the need of scholars to have some shorthand view of what is critical for them to read and be aware of in their field(s).