Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

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Same experience - i did my phd after building my business, which allowed me to be an academic "tourist". Academia is largely a bureaucratic job, with short breaks in which you do research. Just the amount of time spent on formatting papers, writing grants, catching up/organizing conferences, handling students is full time for most PIs. What's worse, funding agencies and grants sometimes explicitly promote this constant "career building" track instead of, you know, plain simple curiosity-driven research.

I also have the sense that academics live in a sort of bubble, prioritizing concerns that are secondary, such as ego contests, impact factors, building CVs etc. (to me at least, this bubble is reminiscent of another microcosmic bubble sector - the army). Of course there are among them true scientists, with intact childlike curiosity and passion, but they are increasingly hard to spot in the overcrowded academia.

One needs to be a part-time scientist so that he has enough time to concentrate on a subject.

   prioritizing concerns ... impact factors

Rest assured that researchers don't prioritise this because we want to, it's because society decided (by voting) that we have to if we want any sort of career progression, funding for students etc.

Who is this society you refer to? When did it vote anything regarding impact factors?

To a very good first approximation, academics are assessed by other academics.

   When did it vote

It's a shorthand for saying the government that was voted in by the people. Although in reality that is also a major simplification, because funding requirements are typically written by administrators in concert with lobbyists, and then waved through by uninterested parliamentarians.

   academics are assessed by 
   other academics

Yes, but the narrative those other academics have to provide has changed. It is now important to show non-academic impact. It is also highly helpful to have industry funding.

There are additional requirements that didn't exist in the past, like gender, ethnic and national quota.

There is Goodhart's law, and scientists develop ways of hacking this system, but there is no free lunch, and the effort that goes into successful bids for funding is major now.

I close with a link to a successful request for research funding from 1921:

https://dirnagl.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/warburg-dfg.jpg

https://dirnagl.com/2014/01/14/otto-warburgs-research-grant/

I 'm with the parent in this one. The journal situation is ridiculous. Scientists have complete control over it - the uber-vast majority of voters know nothing about journals. And it's also ridiculously easy for each and every scientist to effect change: just publish your results in open journals.

I agree, it's a social construct. In my corner of science, publication in open journals and conferences is the norm. That's because a couple years ago senior researchers got together and said "let everything be open". This is orthogonal to what I'm whining about.

Well, the senior scientists who sit in evaluation committees and on editorial boards have some control over it. In many fields, only publications in "top" journals matter. If two persons then apply for the same job or grant and one has a paper in Nature while the other has a paper in Bob's Open Journal, the committee will go with the Nature paper every time.

The senior scientists evaluation committees are quite happy with the status quo and dont want to lose their power in their fiefdom. Search Bing for [PNAS Fiske]

> Scientists have complete control over it

Social science has shown that a group of people can follow some rule even if all members disagree privately. This happens because there is social status, peer pressure and incomplete information, and so people tend to think that the others agree with the status quo.

I think because it seems so counter-intuitive you're ignoring this empirical observation. Scientists simply, believe it or not, don't have "complete control" over the situation.

You are referring to the academic microcosm, but the OP said that scientists act so because "the wider public" voted for them to do so. It's true that the insiders of the academic bubble are living the tragedy of their commons.

> every scientist to effect change: just publish your results in open journals.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem being discussed.

The problem is the pressure to publish frequently, which leads to low quality science. Many of the nobel laureates had at most two, often zero, papers in graduate school. Now, they might require a graduate student to have seven or eight papers to get out. Some of this is a shift to sharing more data, but a lot of it is just science of minimal value being packaged up and pushed out.

And the drive for this does come from generic metrics, that rely not on scientific understanding, but on the ability to count. The government sometimes prioritizes funding by papers/$ funded for grant, papers/year, etc.

You are correct , and i indeed did not complete my thinking. If we can't avoid over-publishing, then at least publishing should be open and fast as long as it's technically correct. Personally i find high-IF journals to be a very bad 'filter' for science. Just publish the damn paper, as long as its methodologically correct, and let the entire community assess its significance, not just 3 overworked reviewers and an editor.

I think government officials don't have a direct interest in supporting the current inefficient publishing model, but it's a model that scientists themselves have accepted and reinforced since the 60s. If scientists put forward an alternative model that works better, i dont think governments or the wider public would object.

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