There's an article in The New Atlantis questioning the useful of peer review; i.e. it does != quality. It goes on to argue that public access to research is actually a better mechanism for ranking published research.

That's reinforced by this other article that describes to pressure to publish in China, and its consequence.

A cover story in China Newsweek on “The Abnormal Corruption of Higher Education” estimates that 530,000 published papers in “key journals” will be required of graduate students in the coming year. Of those, the magazine reports, perhaps 20,000 will genuinely merit publication in China’s 1,500 recognized academic journals, while the authors of the rest will resort to either bribery or “black market” counterfeit journals. And, as described in China Daily, in a recent Ministry of Science and Technology survey of 180 Chinese Ph.D.s, a whopping 60 percent admitted to paying to have their work published, and another 60 percent copped to plagiarizing the work of others.

Research meets the market.

A quick look at the history of the sciences, et al, indicates that the current system of calculating the ranking of scholars by quantity of publications, or where they publish, is pretty absurd. And the Chinese experience demonstrates the consequences of pushing that model to its logical conclusions. Great scholars are remembered for what, and not for how much, they published. Heidegger had to rush something out in order to get promoted to the philosophy chair at Freiburg. That resulted in more people complaining for the next half century that he hadn't published the second part, than people who actually reflected on what he had published. Scholars should only publish when they're ready, and then do so openly.  ¶ 6:35 AM