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Corruption Allegations Rock Australia's CSIRO
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's premiere government research organization, the CSIRO, has been rocked by allegations of corruption including: dishonesty with 60 top-class scientists bullied or fired, fraud against drug giant Novartis, and illegally using intellectual property, faking documents and unreliable testimony to judicial officers. CSIRO boss Megan Clark has refused to discipline the staff responsible and the federal police don't want to get involved. Victims are unimpressed and former CSIRO scientists are calling for an inquiry."
They need to round up this lot of criminals and send them to an island!
Researchers feel ''sliced and diced'' and ''disempowered'', the reviews say, by the need to adhere to what paying customers want.
So it seems that CSIRO got a new director, and, not having enough funds, this new guy started operating the research group like a business, focusing on outside revenue from other companies. Of course, this made it hard to do science, especially since the director wasn't a particularly good director. The scientists almost are turned in to sales people. So it seems kind of bad.
It's a matter of 'not enough money' then 'getting money from the wrong sources' causing motivations to go bad.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The allegations directed at the CSIRO are little different from what could be said about many Australian universities (speaking as a PhD graduate and post-doc of many years' experience in them). It's possible that the CSIRO problems are coming to light first because they have more senior academics; not just hoardes of PhD students and the occasional terrified post-doc.
In particular, it's common for low and mid-level people to be hired from overseas, come to Australia, and see their research stagnate due to lack of funding. New academics don't realise that when Australian positions have "grant writing" as part of the job description, they mean: "You must bring in ALL of your own money, dude, oh, and btw, hope you have better luck with that than ALL THE REST OF OUR DEPARTMENT!" These new people end up fiddling around with bits and pieces of their old research projects from former institutions while they're ground to dust lecturing a bazillion subjects. All of this is covered up by our glorious leaders in Administration who commission glossy brochures to explain how well we're doing in research.
I'm not really at liberty to describe the research culture at CSIRO in great detail, but it is, or at least was, as the articles say, very application-driven and short-term, external-earning motivated. This was only in one division, I cannot speak for the whole of the organization, however these stories seem to indicate that the problem is widespread.
I was at CSIRO between the mid-1990 to the mid 2000, and I have seen it progressively become a very tough place to do research. I was very very happy to leave. I'm not a top researcher by any stretch of the imagination, and I was never bullied, although I did experience unpleasant conflict. Ever since I've left (for academia) I've been more free to conduct my research the way I wanted it, I have found that it is indeed easier to find funding (so far). Looking for funding first and doing skunk research second is a sure way to kill imagination and generate stress, dissatisfaction and mistrust, not to mention poor results. Scientists are not necessarily good salespeople (too frank). Basically CSIRO was (and apparently still is in some places) in some ways a toxic place for scientists.
I hope it improves. CSIRO is nowhere near the top 10 rank it seeks to achieve, at least in the areas I'm familiar with, but there are still very good people working there.