We are funding science backwards.
We make people pay to have access to databases to read research papers and then allow them to cite applicable papers for free.
It should be the opposite. Reading the papers should be free, and researchers should have to pay a license to cite the papers of others.
Consider an alternative research economy where researchers have to pay to cite prior work. That would better incentivise reseachers to focus their studies on works that are most likely to be cited by others (ie. they would be incentivised to produce more impactful research). The researchers that produce highly cited papers would become their own revenue stream to self-fund more of their own work.
Einstein would have died a very very rich man.
That would allow highly successful reseachers to be much less reliant on outside grant sources, and show those grant sources to spread their resources to more new researchers.
We’re in a system that encourages publishing at all cost as much works as possible, with your system the system would encourage publishing quotation worthy work at all cost and as often as possible. Not sure to see how this would improve the mess we’re in?
Wouldn’t publishing a lot of quotation worthy work be better than publishing a lot of work that isn’t quotation worthy?
It would be tailored/devised towards being quotable by other researchers in that field, not as being worthy per se.
Just being “quotable” isn’t going to get you cited (and thus paid). Your work has to be worth being quoted.
Right now, the vast vast majority of published academic work is absolute garbage that no one will ever care about. Even most of the people writing and publishing the garbage barely care about their own garbage. It’s just cranking gears to pad their resumes.
If we rewarded people for high value work, and incentivised cranking out garbage, then we would get more high value work.
If I may: don’t you think you’re trying a bit too hard to be right? If one ‘good’ idea happens to not be that good, one should be fine with it being disposed of: (good) ideas are cheap.
That is a big ‘if’, one that won’t go away in the system as it is because, like you said:
Whole careers have been and are built upon the system working as it is, and the system itself feeds on that: it needs large volumes of content. Resistance to any change will be… huge, to say the least, and that is even if any real change ever manages to reach a significant level.
My 2 cents, regarding the issue you’re wishing to fix, as an outsider myself (and what follow is just that: an outsider mere opinion, that anyone is welcome to contradict).
The issue lies not much in the quality, or its absence, of the work that is being published than in the work being published to begin with. Allow me to explain.
The low quality of the work, and the sheer volume of it, should be considered symptoms of a much larger issue which is the way the scientific publishing business works and the way scientific careers are being made through publications. Symptoms are not the issue they’re (healthy or useful) warning signs of a real problem.
It is the imperative to produce content that is the issue, here. Not that is bad instead of it maybe, possibly being good.
Also, next to the imperative of publishing, don’t forget the very closely linked second imperative that is so often overlooked: reading it. Researchers are expected to be reading that endlessly and quickly growing volume of work in their respective fields, that is the very purpose of the system make it possible for people to propose content for their peers to read and criticize (and to profit from) it. If nobody can write that much work, nobody can read it either.
There is another issue that I won’t discuss here because I think it becomes a lot more… complex and difficult to peacefully discuss it: the interest some groups of people may have in ‘drowning the fish’ in order to push their own ideologies, whatever they can be: saturate the space with garbage/noise. I would consider this as important as What I just mentioned. Back to it.
Scientific publications have been turned into an industry, of scientific writers and readers.
And like most industries they aim for lowering their production cost while maximizing their margins.
So, they mass produce a type of content that, until very recently and unlike most other industrially produced shit, could not be automated and relied on ‘man-power’, man-made content. Content that was written by actual people and that was read (validated) by other people. But they wanted it fast and in always larger volume which is not compatible with ‘man-made’ quality work, in any field.
That mere ‘expectation’ to be quickly and constantly publishing/reading content, that alone was more than enough to push towards a lessening in the quality of both the writer’s and the reader’s work (and also in a lot of disenchantment from those ‘workers’ but that would deserve a debate in itself). And that was enough to create a vicious circle, making it worse as the system keep feeding on itself: always more volume always less… pertinence. Which leads to our present situation.
That is: us witnessing the process moving away from those human workers towards AI-workers or ‘AI-augmented’ or ‘assisted’ workers, as one prefers, that are much cheaper and are also a lot less capable of producing quality anything but so much more capable of producing in large volumes. And that is all that really matters to that industry and its workers: the amount of work that is being produced, not the quality.
Remove the imperative to produce content for people to be able to make a scientific career (worthy or not that should not matter in a system that does not focus on producing at any cost, as low quality products will simply never matter and never spread) to try to make a career and you may have a chance to solve the issue and to maybe salvage the system. Maybe. But then, by removing that need to produce content that your peers will use to judge the significance of your contributions to the field, you instantly create another issue: who will decide who is worthy (or not worthy) to be considered a scientific and to make a career? There is no simple solution.