Saturday, January 11, 2014
They should have stopped after the first sentence
It's been obvious for 60 years that the current arrangement of Big Science (publish or perish, tenure, grant requests, etc) is atrocious and destructive. It keeps getting worse, even though the correct solution has been offered for 60 years.
Here's a newly offered solution that gets close, but misses badly at the end:
The system involves giving all scientists an annual, unconditional fixed amount of funding to conduct their research. All funded scientists are, however, obliged to donate a fixed percentage of all of the funding that they previously received to other researchers. As a result, the funding circulates through the community, converging on researchers that are expected to make the best use of it. “Our alternative funding system is inspired by the mathematical models used to search the internet for relevant information,” said Bollen. “The decentralized funding model uses the wisdom of the entire scientific community to determine a fair distribution of funding.”Fixed annual funding is the correct solution. It must be allowed to accumulate, which this proposal doesn't seem to mention. The need to spend all of a granted budget each year leads to tremendous waste. If a researcher can buy only what he needs, at the moment when he needs it, the waste will be eliminated. The bit about crowd-funding decided by other scientists is a terrible idea. It will reinforce orthodoxy and fashion even more strongly than peer review does. EXACTLY what we don't need. PRECISELY wrong. Encouraging open public crowd-funding would be a good idea. This already happens for some projects, but it seems to be difficult to arrange and is probably forbidden by some universities or states. If open crowd-funding is one of the options provided by each university's grant control office, with assistance in arranging publicity, a lot of unfashionable (i.e. good) projects could be done. ¶ 3:54 AM
