Museum of unintended consequences/Publications and conferences
From CSWiki
Most universities require that faculty publish peer-reviewed papers before they receive tenure and promotion. As a result, the ability to claim a peer reviewed paper has a significant value to faculty. Put in other terms, there is a demand for peer reviewed approval of papers.
When there is a demand, supply will appear. In this case, a number of individuals and organizations have found ways to put on conferences in which it is relatively easy to get papers accepted. These conferences naturally charge registration fees, some of which are used to support the people who organize the conferences. Many of these conferences are held at resort locations, which makes them attractive for both the organizers and the attendees. Peer reviewing is often done by paper submitters. Thus people who submit to a conference review papers submitted by other submitters. Since the notion of peer reviewing is not formally defined, this counts as peer reviewing.
This arrangement seems to satisfy many needs. The paper submitters can claim peer reviewed publications, which they can add to their resumes. The conference organizers make a nice living off the conferences. They also get to travel to resort locations, which in many cases provide complementary rooms for the the organizers of events at their locations.
In response, the more traditional academic conferences have taken to announcing the rejection rates for submissions to their events. The higher the rejection rate, the more academically significant (presumably) the conference. Not all conferences announce rejection rates, and one is not yet required to include on one's resume the rejection rates of publication (conference or journal) venues. It is not even clear that high rejection rates signify quality. If a conference receives far more papers than it can handle, even one of these conferences for profit conferences, it will have a high rejection rate. Yet that doesn't guarantee that the accepted papers are of real academic significance.
The real problem, of course, is the practice in academia or evaluating people on the length of their resumes. As is almost always the case, once a mechanical measurement system is established, those who are to be measured will find ways to manipulate the system to their own ends. In this case, though, what was needed was an additional service that provided the required input to perform the manipulation. That additional service sprung up because so many people needed to manipulate faculty evaluation systems in the same way.
