Thoughts on the state of science nowadays?

[Anomalocaris]

Recently started my postgraduate course, and have found a somewhat disgusting reality.

Publish or perish. Nowadays to publish papers, if possible on prestigious magazines, is what every scientist must strive to. No longer you do science and see what happens. Rather, finding positive results and publishing is what matters today.

Publishers making billions out of the work of scientists who earn nothing back (Elsevier, etc). The career of scientists depending on quantity and quality of papers. Which must be done within a certain time and budget limit. Most of the time research has been already predefined by the laboratory or professor.

Scientific research has become too, a cog in the machine. I’m sure many of you will say that “scientific progress has never been better”, but is it really?

Just because more papers are being published does not mean relevant or useful knowledge. For example, many papers of the same topic will be published with just minor differences. For example, someone used 1mm of alcohol on the experiment. Someone else used 2mm of alcohol. And you get two papers. Yet both of them irrelevant for the topic in question. There is no fundamental or significant progress.

An environment that fosters creativity, time, and and an economical system that allows more budget for research is the best option in my opinion.

As you indicated,  the career of the scientist depends on quantity and quality of the papers.   The quality of the paper in turn is depends on the reputation of the publication which accepts it for publication, and the mechanism publications put in place to chose what to publish from amongst options submitted in turn reflect the fact that it’s own reputation in the long run depends on how often papers it publish are found useful to the progress of science as indicated by other scientists who cites them in their own works.

The mechanism, while seemingly brutal, is not without a reasonable logic.

Science is part of the economy and as such must compete with other demands for the same pool of resources. So the purpose of science is not  to generate more or better results at any cost to the rest of the economy.   in principle investment in science must find the optimum point where marginal investment equals marginal return.     So this is what makes just increasing budget to foster creativity a dubious default solution.   Does increase in budget really foster such increase in creativity that value of science always increasing in proportion to budget increase?

Or a similar question regarding reform that is alleged to increase creativity, would that reform shift the marginal cost of productivity curve of science to the left or right?