Don't Try to Reform Science

Don’t try to reform science. Not yet. Not in your PhD. In grad school, you’ll start complaining about the publishing system. Why do we have to communicate all of our findings exclusively through academic papers? Why can’t we publish negative results, or spend time making things actually work? Why must we—all active academics—continuously emit a stream of papers? And why do we let the notoriously random and inconsistent review process gate our career’s progress? Several things partially alleviate this: you can arXiv papers regardless of acceptance. People write blogs. There are glimmers of alternative, richer publishing formats. Heck, my field’s most powerful models aren’t even published anymore. But, inevitably, the hard facts come down: you’re not going to change how science works in the course of your PhD. You’ve got a PhD to do, and trying to reform science without any authority or reputation will just suck away your time. Worse, when you consider abolishing the traditional syste ... Read full article.