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I started in the academic world full of ideas and ideals. I intended to solve global warming and discovery different alternatives to oil as fuel.
The very word "scientific" is an adjective that gives importance and authority, but there is an inflation and erosion of the values of the process of scientific discovery.
In my career as a researcher I have noticed that there are harmful trends in the scientific and academic world that hinder the development of the potential of many people. I think it is a great loss for everyone and we must discuss solutions. One of my goals with my Steemit.com account is to open this debate.
Today I will only mention one of the aspects which is happening:
"The competition to appear as an author in a maximum of publications".
Your value as a candidate to obtain scholarships or financing for projects depends mostly on your publications (author of articles, book chapter, reports, patents, or plans, etc.). The more the better!
Do you see potential for abuse ...?
When I found out about this need to publish, I had just graduated from Chemistry and my mind began to make calculations of time and work. If you work in the scientific field and you are very efficient, you could have conclusive results of your research and present the results in one or two articles each year. This could demonstrate sufficient academic, professional, scientific or research merit and be positively qualified for any funding.
Then I found, to my surprise, that my colleagues published 3 or 4 articles per year! How do they do that? What am I doing wrong?
Nothing, my first surprise was that they were playing another strategy.
Their strategy was to create and publish lots and lots of papers no matter the content. If since the previous publication they changed a variable; bingo! Another publication! If they analyzed their product from another angle, another publication! And so on.
I was puzzled, because there are people who in this way fatten their curriculum very much with material of relatively low consequence.
This is generating important academic inflation!
[In a next post I will explain the role of scientific magazines, what happens with the copyright, and the advantages offered by open access].
But, really the contribution to the field of knowledge is almost nil.
They publish and study things that do not solve any problems, nor offer real solutions to society.
For example; If you live in Latin America why do you study and publish about the Australian kangaroo? Science and academia are often disconnected from society.
When I understood that the game of publishing without meaning was not my thing I decided to change and look for answers in biotechnology.
I started preparing in this field and then worked with a multidisciplinary team of engineers, biologists, pharmacists and chemists.
It was really great!
The number of ideas and solutions we wanted to bring to the oil remediation area was promising.
We were committed to the job, we designed a plan, and we were predicting good results.
When starting to look for money to develop the project a government company was interested in financing us.
In fact they did, we were working 1 year to get the first results.
But we found to our surprise that after that time the company stated that it was withdrawing for "X" reason.
Well, it happens ... Our team disbanded and we could not finish the whole investigation.
During that year, however, we had presented the whole plan of work to the company that financed us...
Imagine our surprise when, after a year, this company had filed 3 patents in the USA Patent Office with our complete investigation!!!
Yes, they paid us while we gave them our ideas and then they stayed and exploited them ... despite all our legal efforts we did not recover the copyright of our ideas.
Que Putada!!!
Then you wonder, can you steal ideas?
The answer is YES, of course!
In this case it was a big fish taking advantage of a smaller one, but believe me this happens every day at all levels.
This opens your eyes, unfortunately I have seen it more times than I would have liked.
There are researchers and academics who in their eagerness to publish can steal not only ideas, but also the entire results from their co-workers.
I have also had very hardworking colleagues who have found excellent results in their research projects, even publishing patents.
But they have been coerced by their tutors to sign that they waive any benefit that the patent may generate in the future. Another theft of ideas on a large scale. The result of all this is a pyramid game, in return of years of slavery work (endless hours and super demanding for very low salaries in certain cases) you receive as payment a paper with the fancy title of PhD, which is supposed to guarantee a good job (more about the lousy job market for scientists later).
This is the tip of the iceberg if you compare it with the number of articles that offer false and impossible to duplicate results. The macro problem is that entire fields of science are losing credibility, you can only trust some researchers (which you learn from hard experience), and not all the results of published scientific articles can be relied upon anymore.
In recent years, initiatives to avoid this tendency has been seen. Firstly by the commissions evaluating scholarship and funding programs. They ask you to be the main author of your publication (many co-authors actually had little to do with the paper). They like you to do research in qualified study centers, where you need to present preliminary results annually, etc.
But I think ethical training is needed in scientific careers; It also takes some humanity and collaboration. It is not enough just to be a lone genius, you have to work in teams to accomplish true scientific progress.
I think there are many things to improve!! What is your opinion?