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Good Science Project

goodscienceproject.org

There's a serious omission in this organizations list of concerns, namely the increasing control of academic research by corporate interests and the resulting attack on traditional academic norms of open sharing of research results. See the 2005 text by J. Washburn, "University Inc: The corporate corruption of higher education" (intro):

http://kropfpolisci.com/higher.education.washburn.pdf

> "The problem is not university-industry relationships per se; it is the elimination of any clear boundary lines separating academia from commerce. Today, market forces are dictating what is happening in the world of higher education as never before, causing universities to engage in commercial activities unheard of in academia a mere generation ago. Universities now routinely operate complex patenting and licensing operations to market their faculty's inventions (extracting royalty income and other fees in return). They invest their endowment money in risky start-up firms founded by their professors. They run their own industrial parks, venture-capital funds, and for- profit companies, and they publish newsletters encouraging faculty members to commercialize their research by going into business. Often, when a professor becomes the CEO of a new start- up, there is considerable overlap between the research taking place on campus and at the firm, a situation ripe for confusion and conflicts of interest. The question of who owns academic research has grown increasingly contentious, as the openness and sharing that once characterized university life has given way to a new proprietary culture more akin to the business world."

These problems have only gotten worse in the past 15 years; a nice example is the remdesivir story (a Covid-19 treatment whose discovery was financed by taxpayers yet which ended up under the exclusive control of Gilead Inc.)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medic...

Is the pitch directly to taxpayers? There have been lawsuits (by faculty even..including one in which the DOE was deposed) to rein in misappropriation of funds etc., but it seems like the agencies themselves don't care about conflicts of interest at these universities (and basically encourage them). Is it a research organization that says: 'Hey...we only do open source patents'?

> There are arguably too many people being trained as graduate students and post-docs compared to the number of academic positions available.

Is there anything actually being done to solve this problem? Note that I'd include stable research positions in government and industry in addition to stable academic positions.

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see more people talking about this problem, but talking about it alone won't solve it.

The problem is that those in charge disagree with that. When I brought this up after a recent policy change at my department to not allow hiring own PhDs as postdocs (because they should go to another lab, as this is what your CV is expected to look like), I was told that a Phd programme should not be seen as a path towards an academic research career. In contrast, I was told that it is very important to train as many PhD students as possible, that all don't stay in academia, so they can bring scientific thinking to all areas of society. Unfortunately, starting PhD students, of which 99% do this explicitly to do research, are not aware of this, and neither do PhD programmes offer any specific training for a non-academic career.

One solution would be to push more people towards MS degrees, which should be no more than 2-3 years in duration and focused on gaining skills and experience valuable in the private sector.

But then you also need to make MS degrees more consistently good. Some are really good, but others are more like condensed undergrad programs.

They seem to be taking issue with the "up or out" mentality of academia, and it's hard to fix academic mentality without talking about it and trying to change people's minds.

I don't know how effective it will be, but it is a problem: Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8 years total work experience, unless they are promoted to chief. It sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to researchers for a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that the expectation is that they should run their own group.

> Imagine a police department that fires everyone after 8 years total work experience, unless they are promoted to chief. It sounds ridiculous, but we typically hold on to researchers for a 5 year PhD + a 3-5 year postdoc. After that the expectation is that they should run their own group.

I love this analogy.

Foremost this is very cool and hope you guys the best.

Reading through the "High-Risk, High-Reward Research" page I do find myself wondering the moral aspects that this brings up. Golden Ticket holders being able to get funding for what ever they want even when other reviewers disagree is great, but what kind of governance takes place over legal grey areas or things that are ahead of current legislation and falls into an ethical dilemma?

"high-risk, high-reward" science sounds great, until you suddenly have a replication crisis on your hands. Big, exciting results already attract more attention than good, careful, journeyman science, despite generally being, well, wrong.

That's an important thing to keep in mind, but it also seems like the replication crisis is being fuelled by a kind of risk averse attitude. Something like "if you want to get funding and have your career go well, you need to make sure you're regularly producing positive results". From that point of view, not only is ambitious research (working on the most important problems in a field) risky, but so is any research that might not produce positive results. The safe path for scientists is to churn out a load of low quality papers where they're already pretty sure in advance what results they expect to get. And the replication crisis is a natural result. Careful science is in a sense just as risky as ambitious science, and God help anyone trying to carefully work on a hard and important problem.

To be clear, I'm not blaming scientists too much for having this attitude. I think the surrounding incentives play a large part, in particular how bad the job security is for a lot of scientists. Probably a lot of the people who would be working carefully on risky things ended up not being able to get a job.

Useless tangent:

Did anyone else look at the graphic above "Funding High-Risk, High-Reward Science" and immediately see the codepen logo?

(for reference: https://codepen.io)

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