| I think the horse has left he barn in terms of the suggestions in the comic. I love the comic and the attention it's getting but the issues discussed are such a small part of the problem. Many of the comments here are on point. At this point in time, many of the people in power (full professors, administration, etc) see papers as essentially useless, in part because of all the problems being discussed here. p-hacking, guest authorship, etc and so forth and so on. They're seen as a dime a dozen and somewhat ignored. This might sound good until you understand that this means that they're dismissing the entirety of the scientific dialogue essentially, and that their alternative is grant money. My institution had training workshops for grad students where faculty would tell students that research is essentially worthless unless grant money is attached to it. The idea is that papers are a dime a dozen, and that if something is worthwhile, the feds will put their money where their mouth is so to speak. The problem with this, of course, is that the grant system is horribly nepotistic and distorted. The biggest predictor of successful grant application last time I looked (based on empirical research in peer-reviewed journals) is co-authoring papers with someone on the review panel. Grant receipt is only weakly related to citation metrics, and from personal experience I can say that institutions are constantly encouraging researchers to inflate grant costs to bring in more indirect costs. You could fix everything about journals and the publication process and it would do nothing about the shadow scientific world that exists in parallel that drives all the rest of the problems. Eliminate indirect funds, require tenure of all researchers, set aside funding mechanisms for researchers that aren't tied to specific grant applications, randomize grant rewards, depriortize journals, ... there's a lot of things that need to happen. |