When a person with substantial scientific or technical expertise has to spend most of their working life doing a job that does not use that expertise, we usually call it […]

I use the phrase “I am a mother to all of you” deliberately as a metaphor for responsibility, not as a claim of authority over other people. On an airplane, […]

When AI makes scientific manuscripts cheap to generate, the scarce resource becomes the capacity to determine which claims are correct, original, and useful. If submissions grow faster than reliable assessment, evaluation […]

Research grants finance defined activities; scientific salaries pay researchers for their work. The two overlap because grants often fund salaries. The important policy choice is how much a scientist’s livelihood […]

Markets tend to underfund basic research because the organization paying for a discovery can capture only part of the value it creates. Benefits spread to other companies, researchers, consumers, and […]

Blockchain can help science maintain shared records, trace payments, and execute agreed funding rules. It cannot, by itself, establish whether research is true, determine who deserves credit, or make funding […]

The scientific paper may be the wrong unit for funding because the boundaries of a publication rarely match the boundaries of a scientific contribution. One paper can contain several discoveries; […]

Science funding faces a persistent problem: when rewards depend on an indicator of scientific value, researchers gain an incentive to improve that indicator—even when doing so adds little scientific value. […]

A scientific discovery can depend on a theorem, a dataset, an instrument, a software library, and years of maintenance by people absent from the final paper’s author list. Scientific dependency […]

Merit-based funding faces a fundamental problem: identifying someone’s contribution is different from establishing how much benefit that person caused. A researcher may produce a valuable theorem, dataset, or software tool […]