That’s productivity fetish. Not everything is about being productive, research is about finding new things. No one knows how to do this reliably at scale, so the best we’ve come up with is having lots of people working on a range of topics, and hoping a few are fruitful. This idea we can just retweet the unsuccessful researches to private sector doesn’t work, because we don’t know how to not do unproductive research.
Measuring fundamental research by industry productivity standards is how we’ve gotten “publish or perish” culture and “salami slice publishing”. We have to allow space for projects to just fail in research and not have that be the end of someone because they weren’t “productive” enough.
Measuring fundamental research by industry productivity standards is how we’ve gotten “publish or perish” culture and “salami slice publishing”. We have to allow space for projects to just fail in research and not have that be the end of someone because they weren’t “productive” enough.