Why the Research Industry Needs a Major Reform

The barrier to enter the research industry is too high. A reformation is needed to help beginners become researchers and researchers communicate with beginners.

The image above was created using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image creating software with the prompt, “A drawing of a college student having difficulty reading an academic paper.”

    In 2011, less than 1% of the world’s human population read and used research papers in their work. This was estimated by founder of Academia, Richard Price, with data from the National Science Foundation and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a blogpost from 2011.

So why are there so little? 

    Why do 99% of humans not read the frontier of human knowledge everyday? It seems to be that academic articles are not written for the 99%, they are written for other academics and researchers to read. What’s the point of the research if most humans never see it? Why are we not writing research papers so that they can be understood by those not in our field? Students who are interested in research will find that there is a high barrier of entry into the research industry. The following are some of the barriers to the research industry.

Access to research papers is expensive.

    Academics gain access to research by subscribing to large academic journals such as Elsevier. Researchers must pay to gain access to the research and then pay once more to publish their research. This does not make sense. Researchers should not need to pay to gain access to their own work.

    What’s worse is if a non researcher wants to begin research, they need to pay a subscription cost to a journal to gain access to academic papers. There are tons of journals and finding the right articles for the research they are interested in is not simple or easy. Young students would most likely get demotivated by the price on knowledge and the difficulty in finding quality articles. If they get past this step, the next barrier comes in the form of a lack of knowledge.

Research papers are difficult to read.

    For individuals that do not have experience reading research papers, they may find that they need to look up 20 unknown words in Google to get through the abstract, let alone the rest of the paper. Believe it or not, this is the same for researchers as well! If a biology researcher starts to read a physics paper, there is a likely chance they will make it through the abstract and get lost in the introduction. The problem is, researchers do not present their work for any common person to understand — they present their work for other researchers in their field. Researchers within the specific field will be able to understand it but those outside, not so much. This impedes the growth of human knowledge because there is not enough interdisciplinary discourse.

Researchers must write articles that can be easily grasped and further studied to gain a more technical understanding. If a new researcher finally gets through their first papers, they are in for a long and hard journey because…

Research is difficult.

    For those interested in research, not only do they need to have academic journal subscriptions and learn how to read academic papers, they need to learn to conduct research and write an academic paper… Quite daunting. To begin, one may try to find a research group and then try to understand complex papers that the group works with to gain experience. Often times, researchers don’t even conduct new research, they just try to replicate other researchers’ results (which is good for studies, but people interested in research may not know this).

    In this field, it seems one cannot just begin doing private research and publishing. They must be affiliated with an institution, do research under an advisor, and use previous research within the field for their own research. No wonder groundbreaking results are difficult to come by.

    Researchers may also be looking for easy ways to add to their resume instead of conducting quality research. One example of this is p-hacking. In her article “Science Isn’t Broken,” previous FiveThirtyEight science author Christie Aschwanden describes how researchers try to find significant results with low p-values to add to their credibility as a researcher even if their evidence is biased or not a proper sample.

    The research industry must stray away from outputting content solely to boost credibility and land a tenure or job at a university. The growth of human knowledge is far more important.

So what can we do?

    Well, the research industry could use a great reform. On a good note, open access papers and results have become more and more popular. We could also use the power of computers to make visuals and interactive academic papers instead of blocky papers full of text. In terms of researchers getting paid, a better model must be used because it seems that, in the current model, researchers are used by universities to gain standing and academic journals to make money.

    Researchers should be able to have independence and monetise their research. A novel solution is needed to democratise research that gives researchers ownership over their research.


Works Cited

Aschwanden, Christie. “Science Isn't Broken.” FiveThirtyEight, FiveThirtyEight, 19 Aug. 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/. 

Collison, Patrick, and Michael Nielsen. “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 28 Nov. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/. 

Price, Richard. “The Number of Academics and Graduate Students in the World.” Tumblr, 15 Nov. 2011, https://richardprice.io/post/12855561694/the-number-of-academics-and-graduate-students-in. 

Location: Hoboken, NJ, USA

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