Stephen Downes

This is a link to a LinkedIn article, for which I apologize, but I wanted to highlight this. Csaba Szabo takes note of a paper called 'How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers' and its 57 authors. Szabo writes, "What is remarkable is academia's ability to take a set of complaints that have already been repeated for years, repackage them as another publication, distribute the authorship over 57 CVs, generate another citable item, and thereby reproduce almost perfectly the very system the paper is criticizing." Quite right. Szabo should have also noted that this useless scientific output is behind a paywall. That's why I won't link to it directly (you'll have to search for it, like I did, because there's no link to it in the post, and I'm not going to click a dozen times to get through 88 comments to find the ubiquitous 'link in first comment').