[meow1032]

Not OP here, but my issue with the recommendations are that they've pretty accurately listed a whole bunch of mostly structural problems with academia, but all of the suggestions boil down to "we all just need to try harder". You can say something like: "journals need to demand higher standards" but what incentive do they actually have to do so? Then you can counter with "scientists could vote with their feet", but what incentives do they have to do that?? You're asking people to consider seriously damaging their career for some nebulous quality metric.

Frankly, having worked in academia long enough to see at least a couple shifts in culture, the only thing I can see that comes out of this is a couple more things get added on to the ever growing checklist of publishing a paper/submitting a grant application.

I think we need to get away from the sort of thinking where large structural problems can be solved by tiny incremental improvements. If you really want to solve the problem, one or more of [Granting Agencies|Journals|Universities] has to be completely torn down and built back up.

[joppy]

It seems to me, still, that a lot of these problems you bring up can be addressed by universities changing their hiring policies. Which makes sense: academics ultimately rely on universities for their income, and so it is the hiring policies which are setting the perverse incentives. And I don’t think changing hiring policies would be an incremental change, it would be a huge change (and not likely to be made by any university any time soon, since students rank universities on similar metrics to how universities hire staff — a prestigious university will lose prestige even if it changes its hiring policies for the better).

[meow1032]

> academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

Sort of, a huge portion of income is from grants, particularly after the first few years from being hired. More importantly, a huge portion of the University income is from grants. When a researcher recieves a grant, there is an "overhead" percentage that goes to the University. Universities hire, in part, to maximize those overheads, which means getting the researchers with the best chance at getting big grants.

Changing the hiring process may affect how PHD students act, but once they're "in the system", they are subject to all the same problematic incentives.

[tejtm]

> academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

In my decades at it (digital side of bioinformatics) the cash flow is in the other direction.

[mitjak]

> one or more of [Granting Agencies|Journals|Universities] has to be completely torn down and built back up

right, and unless the new institutions are in a financial vacuum, they will remain built on and affected by broader systems, resulting in conflict of interest.