🥅 Incentives Matter: Scientific Publishing Edition
America is rapidly falling to the boring end of the Consolidation-Disruption Index in science. What—pray tell—could be the cause?
Everything below is from an Atlantic article, don’t want to indent due to length.
According to the rules of modern academia, a young academic should build status by publishing as many papers in prestigious journals as she can, harvest the citations for clout, and solicit funding institutions for more money to keep it all going. These rules may have been created with the best intentions—to fund the most promising projects and ensure the productivity of scientists. But they have created a market logic that has some concerning consequences.
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As grants have become more competitive, savvy lab directors have strategically aimed for research that seems plausible but not too radical—optimally new rather than totally new, as one researcher put it.
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“There are journals, which I’d consider predatory journals, that make researchers pay money to publish their papers there, with only symbolic peer review, and then the journals play games by making the authors cite articles from the same journal.”