The data[0] suggests the exact opposite: the more prestigious the journal, the more bad science it attracts.

[0] http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-to...

You think stuff published in nature is better? I found the opposite, that Nature publishes papers with "sexy" results and poorly described methodology. Nature is one of the worst journals, I cringe when info I want is in a Nature article (although with supplements it is getting better).

Hiring committees look at both quantity of publications and citations to those publications. The problem is that quantity doesn't always indicate quality. Which is why journal prestige acts as a proxy measure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor [2] http://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact

Page-rank is "transitive" in the sense that it not only counts citations, but also citations-of-citations, etc.

I wonder though if such a system can be easily gamed (see SEO), without damaging the reputation of offending authors.

Also, we should perhaps have the concept of "negative citations". For example, when the text contains "In this paper we show that the approach of [..] is incorrect."

Many researchers do not love the current system, but are mostly OK with it. They are not looking to topple it; if everyone is using a different option, they will switch, too, but they are not your passionaries to drive the change.

How can you know that?

Edit: I don't know why I get the downvotes. My question might be naive, but its serious. I think it is not self-evident why an unkown self-published journal couldn't give you that. Elsevier was also once unknown. For me it sounds like a logical fallacy, but I wanted to know your take on it. It's pretty cheap to just downvote me for asking.

Compare this to a publication in nature. There, by virtue of the name, you know the article is worth more. (Note that in practice, Nature apparently has quite a few sham publications)

Under self-published journals I understand a journal brought out by the researchers or research organisatons. I don't see why Germany's or even Europe's universities and research institutions couldn't publish a peer-reviewed and checked journal in collaboration, without a third entity, that can provide the quality of, say, nature.

You mean a university press or a society journal? That model worked extremely well for > 100 years, until in the 1990s the societies sold their journals to Wiley, Springer and Elsevier, and somewhere around that time Springer took a wrong turn. You'd really like to ask why the selloff happened when it did.

In recent years, journals that claim to have a peer review process but which actually offer dubious or no review or quality control have proliferated (some are even published by companies like Elsevier). Having no established reputation doesn't prove that a journal is bad, but having an established reputation is a heuristic shortcut for evaluating whether it is good (at least in the "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" sense). Hiring committees use this heuristic to save time when filtering candidates.