Looking back, the trend of academic commercialization definitely exceeds that of the United States, and it is very excessive. Papers can be bought and sold, and papers can be shared. As long as there is money, there are papers. Training courses for issuing papers and applying for funds have also become the profit model of some companies. I hope this article can arouse everyone's thinking.
The White House and the US Congress continue to haggle over the budget proposed by US President Trump, and scientists have to worry about insufficient research funds. However, more funds do not mean better science, and sometimes science itself will have problems because of poor management of research funds.
Pagano has more than 20 years of academic research experience and has undertaken many research projects. From 65438 to 0993, Pagano came to the United States from Italy because he thought that the United States was the best country in the world engaged in biomedical research. He experienced science and gradually took the wrong route. Now, when arguing about scientific research funding, we should also discuss how to reverse the attitude and culture of academic research, what precious things we have lost and how to rebuild them.
From 1998 to 2003, the annual budget of NIH in the United States almost doubled, from 137 billion dollars to 27.2 billion dollars. It seems that this should be a good thing to applaud, which makes people expect to reduce the time for scientists to apply for funds and get better research work, but the result is counterproductive.
Increasing investment will increase the scale of scientists and the number of scientific research products such as papers, but it is of little significance in the quality of scientific research. Quantity without quality is the opposite of science, which encourages the trend of turning scientific research into business, which requires continuous additional investment every year to maintain this trend. Excessive emphasis on increasing employment opportunities and academic transferability in commercialized science will destroy free thinking because of the pursuit of superficial achievements, and free thinking is the key factor to promote the great and unsatisfied scientific progress.
From 1993 to 2007, the number of doctoral degrees awarded in medical and life sciences in the United States tripled. In order to increase the amount of funding, research institutions are very active in this regard. There are more and more research centers, more and more academic teams, and experimental reagent instrument companies are profitable. Unfortunately, one of the main criteria for ranking American biomedical universities is the total amount of NIH funds. In some cases, this prosperity may dilute the quality of science. As a result, the number of fund grants per capita decreased and the application failure rate increased. After 2003, the scale of NIH funds began to decline after the adjustment of inflation rate, which led to the decline of postgraduate and postdoctoral income.
The boom-bust cycle is a typical feature of the economic field, and it is often unstable. Rapid expansion will lead to excessive competition and encourage people to pay attention to quantity or opportunism. The boom-bust cycle also stimulated the emergence of new unnecessary commodities, followed by reagent companies, which were as greedy as a group of hyenas. A large number of online journals take the initiative to accept obviously unscientific papers in order to earn publishing fees. False academic conferences have been repeatedly publicized in some scenic spots, and various special training courses that successfully applied for funds have also been repeatedly launched. In short, everyone regards scientific research as a tool for profit. One stroke after another, the research funding stinks.
This situation urges more and more scientists to pay attention to how to apply for more research funds, rather than to the research work itself. Every research is to apply for more research funds, and every meeting is to meet more possible reviewers. This also urges funding agencies and academic post evaluation committees to judge a scientist's level simply by scientific research output. As long as there are academic papers, as long as there are academic papers from high-impact journals, funding posts are not a problem. Is this business or science?
Commercialization has swept the whole academic industry, including academic publishing. Due to the expansion of claims, every paper must be a complete story and have the ability to transform immediately, that is to say, it is often impossible to have both theoretical and practical significance. Academic learning "research" is more replaced by magazine stories "stories", which is a typical manifestation of scientific kitsch.
In order to obtain commercial benefits, publishers hope to publish more papers that can attract attention. In order to apply for more research funds and the subsequent employment, promotion and salary increase, researchers try their best to publish papers in famous academic journals. With the joint efforts of buyers and sellers, this has formed an upsurge of academic publishing. This will inevitably lead to conflicts of interest that are harmful to science. Publication has become the only motive force of academic research, which determines that success is more important than correctness. When scientific research becomes a business, what matters is no longer high-quality products, but whether it can be bought (published) and whether it can be bought at a good price (good magazines).
It is not easy to rebuild scientific quality. Politicians must understand that the goal of increasing NIH research funding is definitely not as low as adding a few jobs. The allocation of funds should be based on the importance of research issues, not geopolitics and interests. Research institutions need to adjust their mentality and academic mission, and reduce unnecessary academic positions simply to increase funds. Publishers should pay attention to how academic papers can convey solid science more effectively. Scientists should emphasize outstanding and rigorous academic contributions, rather than an increasingly long list of papers and funds.
Science is not business, but high-quality science can make business get real quality.
Source: Science Network-Sun Xuejun
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