It is an unfortunate fact of life, now, that any railing about journal 
rankings and their use by administrators comes a decade too late. Most 
European governments now use those rankings to award funds to 
universities and departments. Department chairs then must tell faculty 
that to get funds, they must cooperate in producing legitimate research 
as certified by the certifiers. I just had the experience of speaking 
with an historian from the university of Oslo who, when asked why he had 
published his paper on X in economics journal Y rather than history 
journal Z, said that his department gets no credit for research 
publications unless the journal is on the "official government list" of 
serious journals. This is a fact of life I know now in the UK (with the 
RAE), France, Italy, The Netherlands, Greece, etc. Curious indeed that 
the US, the home of "assessment" and "accountability", has no such 
national nonsense. But beware the US regional accrediting agencies in 
the future, if state legislatures don't get there first in a response to 
tuition inflation and ever-increasing university budgets to finance 
"excellence".

E. Roy Weintraub