Targets in Academia

Target driven culture has had negative effects in hospitals, schools, with the police force and most other places. Physics academics are primarily measured by the number of papers they publish and how prestigious the journals in which their articles appear are. One way to play the system is to publish the same piece of work several times. I have seen some research groups take the results of the same research project and publish them with slight differences a year apart. Or even the same work published in two journals at the same time; one short article in a better journal and another lengthier explanatory article in a lesser journal. Surely this does not aid scientific communication and wastes the time of everyone involved?