You wish. You see the same crap in regional universities - faculty must do "research" with undergrads and "publish" the stuff. Back then you had campus journals run by students, but now you have predatory journals. What you don't have is administration with a clue.
Administration entered working life sometime in the early 1990s with maybe one or two papers out of their PhD, they worked their way up the ranks and have no notion what they are doing. They may even think that someone who paid OMICS Open Chemistry to print the paper they wrote about the fluff in their belly button did good work. They may even require n papers for tenure. OMICS will provide! Junior faculty need tenure too!
The axe can't fall soon enough. You can't trust academia to police itself, we need academic administrators on a separate career track to police the bloody lot.
No, we don't. Predatory journals are neither run by nor wanted by the academic community. They are a product of exactly such administrators looking at useless stats such as # of papers published in a "journal".
We don't need better trained bureaucrats that will ultimately still just look at "n papers published" or "x citations" or any other mindlessly calculated statistic.
The administrators you mention do not sound like peers (as in peer-review), but more like they are no longer involved in research and just do administrative tasks. If that is the case, then maybe they are simply the wrong people for the job.
Very few people can accurately assess the quality/impact of research, and most of these are the peers themselves, i.e. the researchers/academics currently active in the area. Lists like the one discussed are a helpful tool to do that assessment quicker, as some publications can be immediately flagged for lacking peer-review. But they do not replace actually understanding the research.
Lists like Beall's seem like the way it ought to be done. The academic identify and compile lists of shoddy publications and their peers can treat those journals an as persona non grata.
The citation problem you already have. In a previous workplace the materials science people would push for a publication count. Of course they would! In that field the bar for a viable publication is much lower than in the life sciences.
That's interesting. What did faculty do before predatory open access came along? Are the pressures the same as here in the US at minor colleges?
For those who do not know what predatory publishing is, it is basically the "business" similar to diploma mills: they issue crap credentials (by publishing "scientific articles") for a "modest" fee to people who need those credentials to be employed as "scientists", "researchers", and in many positions (including politics) that formally require those. It mostly happens in developing nations...