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.
First off, that would incentivize researchers to reduce their citations, making it harder for everyone to find relevant related work.
Secondly, it would be trivial to circumvent: just cite review articles from other countries outside this payment system, that reference the works you actually want to cite.
Under my system, a reseacher would be incentivised to sue the publisher claiming their research should have been cited. If anything it would create “research trolls”.
However, a researcher could purchase professional insurance that would handle those claims.
Your idea just gets dumber and dumber.
a researcher could purchase professional insurance that would handle those claims.
And just like that, you’ve invented a new business idea.
Consider an alternative research economy where researchers have to pay to cite prior work.
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.
Or just stop this stupid research capitalism and just fund research enough so that it can be fully free.
Your system isn’t useful, it will just change what bullshit research aims for, and will prevent underfunded researchers from publishing papers that rely on others.
Now that I think about it, your system feels worse than what is currently in place.
You seem to be confusing researchers and publishers.
Most papers are open access now that the Internet exists.
Right. And shouldn’t those people be compensated for their work?
Yes, by government funding.
And how will has that really worked?
Which government? Nothing but cuts everywhere.
