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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

As pointed out very correctly in a comment above: "I believe the problem lies in funding. Currently, we base funding largely off of publication success."

I don't think this is that big a problem. Publications are what science is made of. If you do research and don't publish it so that other people know about it, you're just engaging in a colossal waste of time.

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I agree that disseminating your results is important. However, in computer science at least, "publication" in academic community is applied very narrowly. I think incentive needs to be given for "dissemination of useful knowledge and artifacts" rather than only "publications".

You open-sourced your source code? Sorry, source code is not a publication. You improved your source code so that it is less buggy and acutally usable by industry? Sorry not a publication. You want to travel to PyCon to actually talk about your work to a wider audience? Sorry no travel funding available for such "non-academic" conferences. You want to cite an open-source work that did innovative work but not in academic setting? Sorry that is not a good enough citation ("who is this _why anyway?"), please include more citations of "academic" papers.

Funding incentive is only there for publishing your results but less incentive is there for building of useful working systems.

I would love to see the day where having a successful library on github being used by other researchers would be valued as much as publishing a paper or two.

As a counterpoint, I’ve heard of individuals building entire careers by making obvious and incremental improvements to current methods; each increment is at least one paper and they add up fast. Then the methods and all its improvements are discarded once a more ambitious (and therefore risky) line of research yields entirely new methods with orders of magnitude improvement over the old ones.

Results based funding (and tenure granting) promotes these more conservative and obvious projects. Proposals for more risky, and therefore potentially more rewarding projects aren’t submitted as no one wants to gamble with their own career.

Yes, but the metric should be quality, not quantity. Both do matter to the current system, but there is a perception that it is quantity that has taken precedence.

The lasting record of science is made of publications. The process of science is made of people. If our current system is making scientists who are too specialized to do the science we will need in the future, we're doing it wrong.

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