Verità per Giulio Regeni.
Giulio Regeni was an Italian PhD student at the university of Cambridge, his research was about independent syndicates in Egypt. He was kidnapped in Egypt on January 25th 2016 due to his research. His body, with evident signs of torture, has been found on February 3rd, 2016. Egypt hasn't clarified yet the circumstances of his death. Many associations support his family and friend in search of the truth about his death, e.g.
Amnesty International.
Publish...and perish.
First things first: if you’re a researcher with the “3 T’s” — Talent, Time, Team — then there’s a good chance you’ll produce lots of great papers. But… aside from Talent… do we still have the Time to do good research nowadays? We live in an increasingly hyper-technological world, and it’s only going to get more intense. Yet, instead of providing scientists with the best conditions to develop and share their discoveries, we’re buried under mountains of absurd bureaucracy. We spend way more time writing projects that claim results than actually working to find them! And what about teaching? Students are more and more demanding, while high schools, in general, prepare them less and less. So we have to invest a lot more time and attention just to keep up.
Given all this, how are we supposed to build those hypertrophic CVs filled with dense, non-stop publications? One possible answer lies in the third T: Team. In the name of keeping research teams alive, it’s become normal to share authorship with people who barely contributed — or didn’t contribute at all. The larger the team, the stronger this domino effect. That’s also why, in Europe, many universities originally located in beautiful historical buildings got pushed out to ugly no-man’s lands: to make bigger teams.
But is this really worth it? Why have we become slaves to the H-index, when everyone knows how easy it is to game? Why do we even ACCEPT the idea of university rankings — based on absurd metrics like `how many Nobel laureates work in your institution'? Are we dealing with show business or science and education?
I’ve met so many fellow researchers who feel exactly the same way. But as long as we stay isolated, nothing will change. That’s why I’d like to launch a group of “resistant scientists” — I’m calling it Publish AND Perish — to start discussing concrete actions we can take to stop this madness. The goal? To push governments and institutions to swap the keyword scientific competition with scientific cooperation.
If any of this resonates with you, feel more than welcome to drop me a line.
You may say I’m a dreamer… but I’m not the only one.