Academic publishing is a fundamental requirement for career advancement as an academic. However, much research makes use of the unpaid input of patients, students and the general public. They believe that the research will be used to better the lives of people.
What actually happens is that the research is used to attract funding to build research empires, to fill offices with drones doing PhDs, to fly to conferences.
I'm still reeling from reports of a €500,000 project to improve dementia care that has spent almost all that money on academic salaries and has so far produced not a single tangible change in services for patients or their carers.
With millions of publications, you would think that the world would be a healthier place. Unless that was never the point.
Scientific research, conferences, publishing (of papers) and so forth, have become a large industry which functions according to its own rules, interests, and aims. This industry does not need to be literally corrupt, but it "lives its own life", in which the real value of a research or its results plays a minor role. What matters is the ability of getting money (projects), and of spending it in the way that is good for the researcher, not for humanity. I am not particularly active in research, but this is how I see the things around me.
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your comment. There is no high paid research that it develops science with an elequent degree. You know that Alzheimer disease is explored with only one case. This time there are much more so-called "science center". Which one of them is discovered a worthwhile thing? Actually much more "centers" are financial company that operates in terms of benefit or harm. Our missing part is philosophy and ethic in the science.
Scientific research, conferences, publishing (of papers) and so forth, have become a large industry which functions according to its own rules, interests, and aims. This industry does not need to be literally corrupt, but it "lives its own life", in which the real value of a research or its results plays a minor role. What matters is the ability of getting money (projects), and of spending it in the way that is good for the researcher, not for humanity. I am not particularly active in research, but this is how I see the things around me.
I am an active but independent researcher, Usually ı do not use a fund. I usually publish some interesting cases, and some research that is done without any fund. Science is going to a threatful terminus. Many people regard as a shameful behavior to asking a cross-question about ethic problems in a research. This is a paralel distortion to the moral erosion in the world.
Yes, it is. Health research is hopelessly corrupt. There's no cure.
my 2 pence?
A cure would be possible if you accept that "killing the patient" is seen as "curing the patient", Means to say: the corruptness is an inherently systemic feature. We won't be able to eliminate this within the current system. This is like stopping the coersion for economic growth. That's not possible within our economic system. "System" means the complex of science-health-economic-social-etc. systems.
I am not saying that we could not influence the amount of corruption within the system. But "cure" would mean elimination, not just attenuation, and I think that a real elimination is like removing a side from a triangle: what is left is not a triangle anymore. Changing the amount would correspond to make the side shorter, but this influences the area of the triangle, what creates pressure at other places...
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