Academia, Structurally Fxxked Up
[Pluto Series] #0 — Academia, Structurally Fxxked Up
[Pluto Series] #1 — Research, the Knowledge Creating Industry
[Pluto Series] #2 — Academia, Publishing, and Scholarly Communication
[Pluto Series] #3 — Publish, but really Perish?
[Pluto Series] #4 — Publish or Perish, and Lost in Vain
[Pluto Series] #5 — On Where they Publish
[Pluto Series] #6 — On Number of Publications
[Pluto Series] #7 — On Citation Fundamentals
[Pluto Series] #8 — On Citing Practices
[Pluto Series] #9 — On Tracking Citations
[Pluto Series] #10 — On Peer Reviews
[Pluto Series] #11 — Ending the Series
Everything is Fucked
A professor at the University of Oregon Psychology department posted a fictitious syllabus on his blog to depict why modern science is fucked up. Beyond the rough expressions by Sanjay Srivastava, academia has long been criticized for its problems. Economist, Guardian, Science reported that excessively competitive environment has discouraged researchers. Nobel laureates blame the competition and complex social structure for making it difficult for academics to pursue genuine knowledge. Two Silicon Valley geniuses reported that there had recently been “diminishing returns” in science.
Throughout these criticisms around academia are the common keywords, namely “fierce competition” and “incentive structure.” To sum up the story, modern academia is doomed because of its excessive competition and perverse incentive system. More than a century ago when there wasn’t internet or even computers, scientists happened to discover groundbreaking knowledge through active sharing of information and constructive mutual criticism. Now we have extraordinarily advanced information technology, internet, and the Web, but research communication is being rather shady and opaque. Even worse, globally there are annually more than trillion dollars put into this fucked-up world of science.
Story of Fucked-Up Academia
With the present blog series, Pluto Network will share its thoughts on i) the problems with incentive structure in academia, ii) why it is making scientists not collaborate but rather compete with each other, and why they have to matter to all of us. The initial couple of posts will deal with some necessary backgrounds, not only because it is important for lay people to understand how academia works before talking about its problems but also because even some academics, the pioneers of knowledge, might haven’t thought much about how it’s done or the system in which they work.
- Research, the process of knowledge creation
- Academia, the human-knowledge interaction ecosystem, and Scholarly Communication
- The incentive structure of academia, and the evaluation and its necessity
Thereafter will follow some major points. One post will deal in detail with why the current incentive structure and the evaluation methods are problematic. Several posts will follow up to support with practical phenomena and problems in research world that are either directly caused by that incentive structure or impeded solving. Here we will focus on explaining how these problems connect to the incentives of academics and why some problems were hardly solved even with the decades-long criticisms.
- Criticisms around incentive structure and evaluations in academia
- Practical and phenomenal problems in academia
- Structural relations between the incentives and practical problems
The series will not exhaustively list all problems in academia, nor would it suggest solutions to them. To name a few, educating and training academics, labor intensity of researchers or the dominant use of English in academia are some of the critical issues that need to be discussed. They are, however, out of focus of this series.
Modern research and academia are highly complex. Listing every single problem and suggesting simplistic solutions to such complex matter is neither feasible nor desirable. This series will rather focus on sharing our thoughts in attempt to organize diverse problems in academia in a structure that makes sense and to explain what their root causes are.
After All it’s about Criticism
In many aspects of academia, we find sound criticism to be the core activity. Peer review has that, reproducibility has that, and after all, scrutiny by the community is what makes it stronger. So does it with our story! Share your ideas and criticisms in the comments and strengthen the posts. If you find the posts interesting, please share them with your peers and friends to promote more discussion.
[Pluto Series] #0 — Academia, Structurally Fxxked Up
[Pluto Series] #1 — Research, the Knowledge Creating Industry
[Pluto Series] #2 — Academia, Publishing, and Scholarly Communication
[Pluto Series] #3 — Publish, but really Perish?
[Pluto Series] #4 — Publish or Perish, and Lost in Vain
[Pluto Series] #5 — On Where they Publish
[Pluto Series] #6 — On Number of Publications
[Pluto Series] #7 — On Citation Fundamentals
[Pluto Series] #8 — On Citing Practices
[Pluto Series] #9 — On Tracking Citations
[Pluto Series] #10 — On Peer Reviews
[Pluto Series] #11 — Ending the Series
