I think it’s important to make a distinction between the kind of fraud that Masliah and Tessier-Lavigne were involved with and the world of for-profit journals. The fraud that occurs in high-profile biomedical research is driven by a need for funding on the part of the leadership and a need for publications on the part of the workers. If you’re running a lab and a postdoc brings you a good result, there’s no incentive to really scrutinize it and you need good results to keep your lab funded. If you’re a postdoc, your entire career depends on generating good results, so the incentives for dishonesty are extremely high.
These prestigious biomedical results are not going to predatory for-profit journals though. Those journals serve largely researchers in countries outside of Europe and North America where academic success is judged simply by counting the number of publications, regardless of the quality of those publications. The damage to science overall is minimal because nobody reads that crap.
