Problem #3 is relatively easy to address: shift from journals to conferences. Organizing fake conferences is a lot harder than setting up paper mill journals.
I can tell you from personal experience that organizing a "fake" conference is beyond trivial. All you need is a topic that is narrow enough that all of the attendees know and like each other. I was an attendee at several such conferences back when I made my living publishing papers, and I was astonished at how easy it was to publish bullshit as long as it was the right venue, and how borderline impossible it was to publish anything that I considered to have actual value. (In my career I published dozens of conference papers, but only one journal paper and one book chapter.)
In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.
I get "invited" to fake or semi-fake conferences all the time. Also fake or semi-fake "awards". I just have a programming blog. I would not expect any other field to be any different.
Not really. I see many, many fake conferences adjacent to my field each year. I don’t really see why setting up one would be harder than creating a fake journal.
I think they mean predatory journals and conferences. Setting up a predatory journal costs nothing, whereas actually holding an in-person conference of any kind costs money.
A good time to repost about the famous VIDEA conference:
These conferences have fees, just like predatory journals. They tend to be held in dodgy places in otherwise touristy areas, and most of them are partly or fully online anyway. The cherry on the cake is that attendees can use them as holidays funded by their institution.
I don’t dispute that there are probably orders of magnitude more fake papers than fake conference presentations, just that shifting from journal articles to conference talks won’t help at all. If the incentives shift, current paper mills will just shift with the market.
In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.