LibrarianActivist.org

It’s been in many of the main news outlets. Many Canadian scientists are signing a letter of protest to the Prime Minister on a website called “Don’t leave Canada Behind.” The letter bemoans the cuts to NSERC and CIHR, as well as earmarking money for specific (business and finance) research. NSERC cuts are already affecting the types of library services that will be offered by CISTI. (Here are 10 things you can do for CISTI)

The damage that these cuts will cause are compounded by a scientific culture that is already “becoming too conservative and constrained by social pressure and the demands of rapid and easily measured returns.” There is a great article in PhysicsWorld called “In search of the black swans” that looks at the stiffling culture of result-focused science. Here are a few good sections:

(…) modern science is in danger of losing its creativity unless we can find a systematic way to build a more risk-embracing culture.

The voices making this argument vary widely. For example, the physicist Geoffrey West, who is currently president of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico, US, points out that in the years following the Second World War, US industry created a steady stream of paradigm-changing innovations, including the transistor and the laser, and it happened because places such as Bell Labs fostered a culture of enormously free innovation. “They brought together serious scientists — physicists, engineers and mathematicians — from across disciplines”, says West, “and created a culture of free thinking without which it’s hard to imagine how these ideas could have come about.”

Unfortunately, today’s academic and corporate cultures seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with practices that stifle risk-taking mavericks who have a broad view of science. At universities and funding agencies, for example, tenure and grant committees take decisions based on narrow criteria (focusing on publication lists, citations and impact factors) or on specific plans for near-term results, all of which inherently favour those working in established fields with well-accepted paradigms. In recent years, tightening business practices and efforts to improve efficiency have also driven corporations in a similar direction. “That may be fine in the accounting department,” says West, “but it’s squeezing the life out of innovation.”

(…)

The result, he suggests, is that science is becoming less a “bottom-up” enterprise of free-wheeling exploration — energized by the kind of thinking that led Einstein to relativity — and more a “top-down” process strongly constrained by social conformity, with scientific funding following along fashionable lines.