Consequences of POP: The journal industry and authorship pattern

The POP culture has led to a rapid growth in the journal industry, which has become an oligopolistic market, and changed authorship patterns away from single-author papers. The proliferation of scholarly journals, resulting from the POP culture, is disproportional to the growth in human knowledge. The rise of predatory journals is also a consequence of POP. The proliferation of journals, predatory or otherwise, has led to a rapidly declining quality of published research. Other related consequences of the POP culture are the growth of parasitic activities, such as the organization of low-quality conferences, and the rise of elitism and class structure in academia. POP has brought with it the fractional author, as papers with a large number of authors have become the norm.