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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

There's many more issues distorting or distorted by academic publishing. For example, grants being awarded to the most productive members. Sounds fine at face value, but compare biologists working with ecological systems and biologists working with DNA. In the first case collecting data by definition has to take decades, in the other it's a matter of hours these days. The ecologists needs more money because it inherently takes longer to research, yet the grants are more likely to be awarded to the DNA researchers because they publish more.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a biologist myself - this is a second-hand story from a biologist friend so if the story doesn't hold up under close scrutiny, my apologies.

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Yes and No. Yes ecologists take more time to collect data.

However ecology is much cheaper than mol. biology. Essentially its ecology = manpower vs mol. biology = manpower + expensive technology + expensive chemistry.

Also ecology has been one of the most resistant fields to sharing data whereas genomics (the big data end of mol. biology) has been the most enthusiastic. There was a vey noticeable divide in opinion on twitter when PLOS journals mooted making authors make all their data public.

I think this is precisely because ecologists invest so much on collecting their field data, so they become possessive. Ecologists can become very senior PI by essentially owning a long term ecological study and assigning their students to continuing it.

Genomics and to a lesser extent Mol. Biol. has been keener recently to share as there is a strong open source ethos coming in from the computing side - and it is often a very expensive multi-centre, multi-agency collaboration.

Within fields this is taken into account. Some areas can be very quick to generate data, whereas others take longer and /or more manpower. One would not expect someone doing studies in mice, or clinical studies, to generate the same number of papers as one doing biochemistry, for example.

The incentive to publish frequently is not universal, however, some reviewing committees ask only for one to present the best 5 papers in the last 10 years, for example.

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