I’m not in academia so I might not know what I’m talking about at all, but: “Number if papers published” smells an awful lot like bs industry metrics like number of lines of code written, number of features shipped, number of bugs fixed and so on, that the industry wrongly rewards.

I don’t know what you’d replace “number of papers” with, but it probably should not be so easily quantifiable and gameable.

I have published all my papers since 2023 on the web. None were peer reviewed, but on pre-print servers.

Einstein's 1905 papers were published without peer review.

I still get spam emails asking me to pay for papers I've already uploaded to public servers years ago.

Here's one from this morning- already deleted by Google's spam filter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h8YVu5-DEx-1mOibiLpfJHrErvX...

The actual article was intended as a joke: https://vixra.org/abs/2405.0051 yet fraudulent publishers continue to treat it as a serious article.

It would be nice if publishing a fake paper every now and then could serve like a sinkhole for scammers, but I would be too optimistic or naive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_sinkhole