[ht_th]

Research is highly competitive business mixed with industry involvement (or government involvement). You have to publish and fast. You have to develop your discoveries into something that can be monetized. You have to collaborate with industry to get funded. You have to cut costs to keep doing what you want to do. And so on. The idea of freedom in (fundamental) research seems long dead. How I long for the freedom in the research labs in the first half of the 20th century. To really explore an idea without regard for cost, returns, (publishable) results. A researcher can dream :-(

[ansgri]

> The idea of freedom in (fundamental) research seems long dead

Is it so in the US? Or where? Here in Russia it is far from true, at least in the top institutes. As long as you produce publishable results, you may do virtually whatever you want, and nowadays pretty much anything is publishable. And this way you get funding, too, because the funding agency doesn't seem to want you to solve some particular problem, it just wants to be sure your science keeps up with the world.

The downside here is that the academy usually pays bad. Thus it seems most successful labs work like 70/30 on commercial projects and "pure science". Anyway, when you work on commercial projects you usually get much more interesting results than you'd care to publish.

[ht_th]

Here in the Netherlands it is. I assumed it to be the same in the Western world, but those kind of generalizations often turn around to bite me in the ass. We, researcher in the Netherlands, have to produce as funding depends on it. Furthermore, as the government funds less and less, we have to get more funding from industry. And finally we have to try to market our research more. This all means that we can not afford to just do whatever we think is best for the only purpose of extending our knowledge. We have to think about our career and the sustainability of our research (strand) in the long run.

That does not mean that we're just lapdogs for industry or Mammon, but it does mean that we're selective in what we do and how we do it.