In a Chronicle article, Mark Bauerlein, Mohamad Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley Trimble discuss the vast outpouring of academic research that is mostly redundant and wasteful.
No surprise there. We heavily subsidize academic research, and as any good economist will tell you, when you subsidize anything, you get too much of it and much of the output will be of low quality.
I recall seeing a 60 Minutes segment years ago on the effects of art subsidies in the Netherlands — the government had warehouses filled with paintings that no one would buy. Instead of warehouses filled with bad paintings, we have journals filled with research no one would pay for. Academic research is no more intrinsically good than is art, and if you sever the connection between voluntary financial support and production, you wind up wasting resources.