10 things about academia that will blow your mind!
1. Academics don’t get paid for their research.
The current system mind-bogglingly works in reverse to what is logical and fair — academics have to pay anywhere up to US $10,000 for their research to be published with that journal. They also donate billions per annum in unpaid labour to their universities. When the main KPI is number of publications but neither your time for doing the research nor the cost for disseminating it are covered, you’re left with a most unpleasant truth — that you are not being paid to do your job, you are paying to do it.
2. 55% to 90% of research manuscripts are rejected.
The average rejection rate across academic journals is 55% and some of the most prestigious journals have a rejection rate of 90%. Some may think this is good because bad research is rightly being weeded out but actually a lot of knowledge and thought-provoking ideas are going unseen. The gap between what is being written and what can be read is enormous and has produced a crisis around freedom of research speech and freedom of research information. Academia is afraid to call this out because too much money in the business of publishing is at stake, but academics and the wider community who depend on their research findings are being gatekept…
