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BioTechniques
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.

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.