Science Reform

The failed response to the Covid pandemic has unveiled the need for fundamental reforms in the scientific community. The problems go further back than that though, and the current structure has led to a gradual decline and stagnation in the development of new scientific ideas and knowledge.

Science and fundamental scientific truths are eternal. To return to the era of enlightenment, there is an urgent need to reform the funding of scientific research, the scientific publication and peer review process, the evaluation and promotion of scientists, and the nature of scientific discourse, which should be open and friendly.

Research Funding

With Anthony Fauci sitting on the biggest pile of infectious disease research money in the world, scientists were wary of criticizing his misguided pandemic policies. Moreover, as the head of funding agencies, different scientists will have different ideas regarding promising new research areas to pursue, and a single agency head can impede important new research directions. For both these reasons, research funding decisions should be more decentralized.

Scientists waste a lot of time writing research proposals that are never funded. Writing multiple proposals, scientists are commonly funded for less interesting proposals rather than the for the research they themselves think is the most novel and important. At best, they will do the more interesting research for free on the side while still fulfilling the requirements of their funded research. At worst, the more novel research never gets done. Scientists should have more flexibility to pursue their best scientific ideas without a cumbersome and slow research funding system.

Today, research is primarily funded based on proposals for new research, which are hard to evaluate. More research funding decisions should be based on research that has already been conducted and published, which is easier to evaluate. For younger scientists, there should be a more streamlined process rather than the current system where they are first evaluated to be hired and then evaluated for the research proposals they write as newly hired scientists.

Scientific Publications and Peer Review

The scientific publishing process is slow and time consuming for scientists and costly for universities, without publishers providing much value added. Moreover, many scientific articles are not available to the public who paid for it.

Scientific journals are no longer needed to print and distribute paper copies of journals and the ‘prestige’ of a journal should not be used as a surrogate for evaluating the quality of research. Scientific journals just slow down scientific communication. Universities and other research institutes have already evaluated their faculty, and should want all their research to be published without any further gatekeeping. If academic institutions published all the research from their faculty, journals are no longer needed.

Scientific peer-review is very important, giving scientists important feedback on their work, but anonymous gatekeeping of science is easily abused. Instead, peer reviews should be open for everyone to read, providing readers with additional insight into the science being reviewed. That will also give proper credit and recognition of the important work done by reviewers. 

To help popularize this model, the Academy for Science and Freedom is launching its own open access open peer-review journal, the Academy Proceedings in Public Health. In this journal, Academy fellows, who have all been selected because they are superb research scientists, can immediately publish their important research without any further gatekeeping. It is our hope that this will inspire other academic institutions to launch similar journals for their faculty members.

Evaluation and Promotion of Scientists

Scientists conduct original research, develop new methods, synthesize research, teach undergraduate and graduate students, mentor and engage with other scientists and educate the public about science. All these should be appreciated and promoted, and scientists should not be valued more or less depending on their chosen areas of focus. In today’s world, scientist is valued more for publishing dozens of research articles of limited quality than a for a series of well written popular science articles for the public.

Commonly used research metrics, such as the journal citation index, the h-index and the number of published papers, are fundamentally flawed. If numerical metrics are used, they need to be replaced by more appropriate indices, incorporating better metrics for research quality, impact and novelty.

Instead of the quality of the science itself, much of science is weirdly evaluated based on the prestige of journal in which it is published. The best research evaluation is to read a small selection of the scientists’ best research articles, together with open peer reviews of those articles.

Academy Activities

To reform scientific activities, the academy and its fellows organizes conferences and workshops; writes op-eds; conduct scientific research; and writes white papers with concrete proposals for reforms.

Conferences and Workshops

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Op-Eds

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Scientific Articles

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White Papers

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