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 thing first: if you're a researcher with the "3 T's": Talent, Time, Team, then there's a big chance that you'll produce a lot of very good papers, but...apart from Talent...do we still have the Time to do good research nowadays?
We live in a hypertechnological society, that will likely become even more so in the future, however, instead of giving to scientists the best possible conditions to produce and communicate their discoveries, we are buried under a huge amount of crazy bureaucratic papers to fill and we must spend much more time writing projects *claiming* results rather than working to finding them! ...and, what about teaching? Students are more and more demanding and, in general, high schools are preparing them less and less well, so we must dedicate much more time and attention to them.
So, within this system, how is it possible to have a hypertrophic CV filled with temporally dense publications? One answer can lie in the third T of the beginning: a good research Team. For the sake of the survival of the team, it is common to share publications with people who didn't do that much...or nothing at all. The bigger the team, the stronger this chain reaction effect, this is why, for example, in Europe many universities which occupied historical building in the city center were pushed in ugly no-man's land in the middle of nowhere to create a bigger Team...
Is this really worth? Why have we become slaves of the H-index when everybody knows that there are hundreds of ways to bias it? Why do we even ACCEPT the concept of a university ranking, when all these rankings are based on crazy criteria, such as having a Nobel prize in your university! Doesn't it seems to you that this is much more show-biz than science or education?
I met so many fellow researchers who think exactly the same as me, but if we remain separate we can't achieve anything. I'd like to create a group of resistant scientists "Publish AND perish" to think about concrete actions to propose in order to stop this nonsense and to make governments change the keyword "scientific competition" to "scientific cooperation". If you agree with what you've just read, feel more than welcome to drop me a line.
You may say I'm a dreamer...but I'm not the only one...