Barry Bozeman: Honest clients are in short supply. Most of them think they already have the answers, and want someone to find the numbers to prove them right.
John Marburger: We need disinterested people.
Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble: More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise. If only that were true. While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. More isn't better. At some point, quality gives way to quantity.
Louis Menand: Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20's in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read -- and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.
Rachel Toor: I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people's ideas aren't that brilliant.
Julian Gough: As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading.
Anne Sasso: History shows that the deeper your idea cuts into the heart of a field, the more your peers are likely to challenge you. Rejection is indeed a big part of being a scientist.
Ben Goldacre: Open data -- people posting their data freely for all to re-analyse -- is the big hip new zeitgeist, and a vitally important new idea. But I was surprised to find that the thing I've advocated for wasn't enough: open data is sometimes no use unless we also have open methods.
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