We’re throwing billions of dollars’ worth of research on a digital compost heap. This needs to stop.

A new investigative report by journalists at Science and Retraction Watch lifts the lid on what appears to be a concerted effort by one university to game the current science publishing system. The story focuses on Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, which requires hundreds of undergraduates to write manuscripts on research they’ve done as students. That sounds like a fine exercise for the class. The twist is that these student manuscripts then get published in bottom-of-the-barrel journals.

Which contains more information: a five-minute video or a five-page document? As anyone who’s had to pay for excess cellular bandwidth knows, the video contains far more raw data than the text file. That doesn’t mean it has more information, though. What if the video shows someone reading a Dr. Seuss book aloud? Most of the raw data in the video would just be a binary encoding of the speaker’s picture, and a tiny bit of motion around their mouth.