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Academics Not Productive Enough? Sack 'em
ananyo writes "One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university. Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn't published at least four 'research outputs' over the past three years. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in. Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said."
In the short run you are better just continuing with the next approach. However if all the people keep publishing said "failures" and constantly look for other researchers' failures then in the long run, everyone does more research because they know what attempts are going to fail beforehand.
Ideally, researchers would also publish the attempt when they get started on it s.t. there aren't too many people working on the same approach but then you need to factor in the fact that an approach might be to tough for a researcher in which case he should let someone else do it. (Of course, this also assumes that all people are honest and their skills perfectly quantifiable which is obviously wrong)
ics
It won't. Clearly. But you are missing the point.
The whole publish or perish paradigm is set up because publishing professors typically have a stronger ability to get grants, which then help fund the university (which typically takes a portion of the grant money into a more general fund). Grant givers almost always look at the publication record of the applicants, and those who are publishing more are MUCH more likely to get the grant. And yes, this is even in cases where supposedly the grants are given 'blind'. Well-known authors in any field develop a distinct style and those who are familiar with the field are likely to recognize that style. Thus grants are given to people who are already productive.
In the end, science research as funded via universities is a bit of a circular situation and it's all a bit self-congratulatory for the people at the top of their field. Which is of course why anyone wanting to do research in a field needs to attach themselves to one of the top researchers during under-grad/graduate years, so that they get the chance to be 2nd (or 3rd or 5th) author on a number of papers published by the BIGNAME. Then after they do that for a while, they get to be first author and BIGNAME moves to last author, but their names become strongly associated, and eventually the rising star gets to move into their own celebrity status, while the BIGNAME just keeps getting more recognition.
If I sound bitter, it may be because this is system is hardly designed to foster innovation, and is hardly conducive to outsiders being brought in. The real rule is conformity to the status quo. If you start out trying to make your own name, or trying to publish things that go against the grain, then you will get quietly ignored by the publishers. Personally, I'm no longer in research, and I'm just as well off gone from that particular insanity.
I have a good friend who has a PhD in astrophysics, but because all he really wants to do is teach, no one will ever know much about him. Will he ever make some great discovery about astrophysics? LIkely not, even though he's as intelligent as any person you'll likely meet. But because he has a passion for passing on the knowledge he has to new students of physics rather than spend years fiddling around with galactic simulations, he'll likely always have lower pay than most professors, and he'll likely never get mentioned as an important figure in astrophysics. And let's be honest, saying, "I inspired thousands of students to continue learning about physics" sounds trite and boring, but saying "I figured out why some stars go supernova and others don't" sounds much more 'important'. Honestly though, the professors that teach the rising students the basic grounding in a subject so that *the new students* of a subject can go on and make important discoveries are the ones that deserve a lot of credit. The professors that ignore students that aren't actively doing research *with them* are often (not always) doing little more than polishing an already sparkly name. Yes, they bring in money for the universities. Yes, the research they do is *often* important, and yes, we need people who are willing to do real research. Yet, at the end of the day, if we don't have people who are competent at actually *teaching*, then we are going to eventually get ourselves into trouble when all the students decide to go get an MBA so they can actually make a decent living.
Did you ever do research that wasn't heavily directed by your professor?
My research was always assisted in various ways by my mentor professor and many other people as well. But it was still MY research, MY writing, and MY article at the end of the day. If I had listed everyone who critiqued it, offered me advice on it, or provided information for it as co-author, the list of authors would have went on for two pages.
I was fortunate that none of my mentors ever had the gall to ask for such a thing (I was blessed to work with some very good people). But I knew plenty of other grad students who weren't so lucky. There was one prof who was NOTORIOUS for this. He would demand a co-author credit on papers and articles he hadn't even READ. If you were one of his grad students and you wrote a paper for another professor in a research class, and then you later decided to present it, he expected a co-author credit even on that. And he would openly threaten grad students who didn't want to do it (and since having a member of your dissertation committee turn on you was essentially the end of your academic career, his threats carried a lot of weight). And this prick was the DEPARTMENT CHAIR. He got that because he brought in a lot of grant money (the prick looked GREAT on paper, and wasn't above using all sorts of..."questionable" means of getting those grants).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.