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发帖数: 6201 | 1 04/10/2012 Tanya Lewis
In a series of comments in Nature, economists suggest ways to reduce
financial inefficiency in academic research, but some researchers don’t
believe science should be managed like a business.
In today’s economic climate, academic institutions are seeking to maximize
their investment in research. While financial and productivity experts agree
that inefficiencies exist within the system, their suggestions for
improvement vary.
Last week, Nature published three commentaries (1–3) on research efficiency
by authors from academia and consulting.
Academic research, like other fields, could improve its efficiency,
consultants say. Source: Aaron Logan
In one of these articles, economist Paula Stephan from Georgia State
University argues that the problem lies with damaging incentives that do not
accurately reflect career prospects. Stephan brought up a familiar dilemma
for many young scientists: an ever-decreasing chance of obtaining a tenured
faculty or research position at an academic university. In her opinion,
research faculty hire postdoctoral researchers and graduate students as
cheap labor, while perpetuating false hopes of promising, fulfilling careers
in science.
“It’s like a pyramid scheme,” Stephan said. “The system doesn’t really
seem to worry about whether there are jobs for these people when they
graduate or when they leave a postdoctoral position. We’re producing these
people who are trained to do research... and then we seed them out.”
Geneticist Gholson Lyon from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York
agrees. “Too many people are being trained to become Ph.D.s in biomedical
research right now in America, without adequate notification that there are
very few job opportunities in academia,” he wrote in an email to
BioTechniques.
In another of the commentaries, academic consultant Marty Thomas from the
Swiss consulting firm Berinfor claimed academics waste time on
administrative duties that could be handled better by adopting models from
business.
“Efficiency is largely about saving time and effort, not reducing
expenditures,” wrote Marty in his article that was commissioned by Nature.
“Adapting concepts from private business will help academic institutions to
address inefficiencies and get faculty members back to teaching and
research.”
But here Lyon and other online commentators strongly disagreed. In a comment
on Marty’s article, Lyon wrote: “I am very surprised that Nature allowed
this advertisement to appear as a commentary in their pages.”
Physicist Igor Litvinyuk from Kansas State University dismissed the article
as well. He wrote that “scientific research is not a conveyor-belt output-
generating factory but a creative pursuit more akin to art than to business.
”
And in the final Nature comment, associate professor Pierre Azoulay from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed using a scientific approach
for evaluating research funding models themselves. Azoulay wrote that “this
vision will sound utopian to some,” but cited several examples of how such
studies might proceed.
“Experimenting on ourselves may well lay bare some shortcomings of the
scientific community,” he wrote.
References
1. Stephan, P. 2012. Research efficiency: Perverse incentives. Nature 484(
7392):29-31.
2. Marty, T. 2012. Research efficiency: Clean up the waste. Nature 484(7392)
:27-28.
3. Azoulay, P. 2012. Research efficiency: Turn the scientific method on
ourselves. Nature 484(7392):31-32. |
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