It seems that the academic article is currently more part of the problem than the solution for the scientific community. The race for the biggest impact and the so called “publish or perish” mentality are responsible for many ethically dubious practices, such as dissecting research results in order to produce the maximum number of articles, inflating lists of referenced articles and co-authors to boost impact factors, and data jealousy (as in – even though I don’t have any use for this data any more, I sure as hell am not publishing it to benefit my competitors). Even though these practices can’t be cataloged under scientific misconduct or fraud, they give science a bad name and jeopardize the quality of published research.

Source : Impact of Social Sciences – The case against the journal article: The age of publisher authority is going, going, gone — and we’ll be just fine.