Speaker 1: The first reason we need to rethink academia is because we've got to a point where paper mills make business sense. Paper mills are companies that produce bogus or like spun data and then sell positions as authors to academics that are then essentially published in quite reputable journals. And if you're thinking to yourself, well, that doesn't really matter because, you know, it's only just rubbish journals that these get published in. That is false. And I'll show you that in a minute. And I found this article where we look at one academic paper's journey through the paper mill. And essentially there's this website, right? Look at it. But it oozes shadiness. Just look at that. Highlighting stuff. There is no design gone into this. But essentially this is what they are advertising. That they can get in nature biotech, nanotech, nature reviews, nature methods. So these are not just your rubbish journals. These are real journals with real big impact on people's lives. No wonder academics are so important. They are deciding to just sort of like fake the system. Now this website claims to have broken more than 20,000 authorship slots in 4,000 scholarly papers. And it can sell them up to $5,000 each with first authorships, usually the most expensive. Now that is only one site of many, many sites doing this. And why do they exist? Because over time, for some reason, we've decided that the more papers you publish, the better researcher you are. It doesn't matter what's actually in those papers. And that is one of the first. biggest issues we have. These paper mills produce bogus research and push it out into the world. All that really matters is the metrics, the H index, your number of papers that are cited by that many papers. My H index is about 14, I think, at the moment, which isn't good or bad. It just is. The higher that number, the more likely you are to be promoted in your academic field. The more likely you're going to get a permanent position. There are so few positions that there's no wonder that people are actually sort of just paying to get on papers because that's easier than doing the actual work. So what can we do about it? Well, there are tools that are coming out. So this is like a new tool detects paper originating from paper mills. So it is a bit of a cat and mouse game. Unfortunately, these paper mills are well ahead of any of the technology we've got at the moment. And so that's why the academic system at the very fundamental core of what we're saying is important needs to change. No more. Should we say that the more papers you've got in higher impact factor journals, whatever that impact factor really means in the real world, you know, a lot of these papers don't really get read anyway, even if they're published in very high impact factor journals. So what we've got to do is change the absolute structure of academia. We need to work out what's actually important and also get rid of that stupid single metric that dictates your career. If you have clever people and a single metric, I can guarantee you they're going to gain the system to make it better. And that just leads to a load of other issues that we'll talk about now. The second thing that I would argue is that academia is built on exploitation, and producing a level of anxiety in all of the people working under it so that they don't have a chance to collect their thoughts and actually go, you know what, this is rubbish. So this article came out, academia is built on exploitation. And essentially, it's this, that mental health issues for PhD students are so common, they could be considered part and parcel of the qualification. Recent research has found that over 30% of PhD students develop a psychiatric condition. This is people working in defense and emergency services, which is about 22%. If that same mental illness occurred outside in another profession, there would be outrage. But for some reason, we just go, oh, yeah, it's just part of it. Don't worry about it. Yeah, doing a PhD is stressful. Isn't it stressful? No, it shouldn't be like that. We need to change the system. And I think it starts at the very top, even the university system under which the academics work before we even think about the PhD students and the postdocs. That is a flawed system. And this is my own little conspiracy theory. Make of it what you will. But every single university that I have worked at always is undergoing some form of large, disruptive, organizational change. It could be that they're going from a centralized thing to a decentralized process. Then maybe they're centralizing all of their university services. Maybe they're getting rid of a certain number of academics because of budget cuts or whatever. I think that this is actually, I feel like they do this every so often, every sort of like five years or so, so people can't get comfortable in the positions that they're in. It's more about sort of like showing you're better than someone else. It's more about sort of like causing unease, like who's going to lose their job, you know, who needs to fight for their job, who isn't doing the best job that they can do. And all of that just creates this horrible kind of like boiling pot, this pressure cooker of horrible feelings and stress and anxiety. And I think that filters down on PhD students because these academics don't mean to be mean to their PhD students a lot of the time. But unfortunately, like this article points out, the ones most likely to be on the receiving end of this are PhD students, postdoc researchers and non-academic staff who are often on short term employment contracts. And that means they can't speak up. If they speak up about the wrongdoings they see, they are more than likely going to be terminated. So, this whole system needs to change. The power needs to change. We need to give academics the freedom to start doing what want, when they want without these large institutional changes putting pressure on them. It filters down through the whole pyramid system of academia and therefore we end up with this highly stressful environment that needs to change immediately. I think this is really interesting that this paper here, a mental health screening tool for graduate students, this was published this year, just talks about how among the 778 graduate students who accessed and completed a survey, 60% met the burnout threshold, 58% scored 8 out of 16 on the stress scale, 32% met the depression threshold, 47% met the anxiety threshold, 54% reported one or more symptoms of PTSD, 38% reported poor health behaviours and a significant positive correlation was found between burnout, perceived stress, depression and anxiety. That is a horror. Horrible thing to be writing in a paper but we all just go, oh yeah, it's fine, it's just academia innit? There is so much stress in the academic system that people are literally making stuff up to stand out. You need to be sort of like part of that cream that rises to the top in academia otherwise you are just ignored and that means you end up with a load of people fabricating stuff to try to get grants, to try to stand out in their field, to get sort of like notoriety for a new thing that they found. All of that. All of that leads to continuous sort of systematic lying and we've got here science fiction in university labs and this was published this year. I'm not saying that this is like peer review, this is just someone's opinion but essentially it goes through this horrible situation where someone was found out to have sort of like done something a bit dodgy with their papers and guess who actually says, oh you know what, we'll investigate it. The university under which they work. So that clearly isn't going to be a non-biased review is it? They're not going to come out and say actually yeah a lot of our researchers, we've created this like horrible system for them which means they have to continually lie anyway so yeah that's what we did. They're not going to do that. They're just going to say oh no look this person did it, you know, it was unintentional lying, don't worry about it, you know, we're on top of it now, that's definitely the last case and the most you'll hear of that from this institution. Wrong. All of this will continue. All of this will continue. We need an external body that comes into universities to look at academic misconduct because we cannot rely on internal investigations to correct this. We need an external body but that's not sexy, that's not interesting, that's not going to actually make science faster, it's going to slow things down. But importantly it is going to increase the trust that we put in academics, it is going to increase the amount of eyes that are on different bits of work. And I'm amazed that we don't see an external review board as often. It comes down to like independent and non-funded entities like Retraction Watch and other kind of like academics who do it free of charge because they want to see academia improve. That needs to change if we are ever going to sort of like just get around this fact that people need to lie to make themselves stand out. I mean ultimately it comes down to just making sure that we don't judge people on that in academia anymore. It's a bigger problem than anyone I think realises in academia. It's a bigger problem than anyone I think realises in academia because they're all so worried about just doing their job, not losing their job, bringing in money, that we just need to stop for like six months and just like sort this shit out. And because we've got this pressure to publish, the biggest symptom that we have of an academic system needing a complete makeover is the reproducibility crisis. It is not sexy, it is not funded. It is something that is so important however. We must have people reproducing work. or have a number of really serious checks that go on before something is published. But technology has come on so far, we've got video, we've got AI, we've got audio, we've got everything that we could throw and actually just sort of like saying, okay, now prove that you've done what you've done, show us how you've done it, and let's ask other experts to critique what you actually have done. It's easy to record a video of a particular process. It's easy to get screen grabs of your analysis. It's easy to just sort of like put your raw data up somewhere so someone else can have a look at it. All of that would just mean that the reproducibility crisis would diminish and reduce a lot. I find this article, which is like reproducibility, does it really matter? Yes, it does matter. But ultimately, here are things at the bottom that you can do to reduce irreproducible science or increase reproducibility, thanks for that. Increasing the number of competent peer reviewers, financial incentives for authors and editors, insufficient or artificial motivation can spur increased cheating and thus reproducibility, like these weird impact factors that almost mean nothing. Effectively implementing penalties for misconduct and fraud that are retroactively implemented, making all published science open access and not that bullshit open access we need to pay for it. Financial restrictions will spur greater scrutiny of research and selectivity, and clarify the boundaries and definitions between bad, flawed, and non-reproducible science and negative results. All of these things are simple things that we can do, but academia is so flawed and so broken at the moment that we just don't have a moment to sit and relax and tackle these head on. If we all sat down and just said, you know what, these are the issues, how could we solve them? We could get much further, but we are not allowed to because it's just a little pressure pot of competition, of comparison, of gaming metrics, and that ultimately is the underlying reason why these things are not being solved. If you liked this video, remember to go check out this one, where I talk about academia is broken and the publishing scandal that is going on right now. I think you'll love it. So there we have it. There's everything you need to know about rethinking academia. As always, I love to know what you think. Let me know in the comments. And also remember, there are more ways you can engage with me. First of all, sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewsturton.com.au for slash newsletter for my free newsletter. You'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcast, I've done, how to write the perfect abstract, and more. It's exclusive content available for free. So go check it out now. And also head over to academiainsider.com. That's my project where I've got my eBooks, my resource pack, my blog, my forum, and everything's over there to make sure that academia works for you. All right then, I'll see you in the next video.