I recently had the great pleasure of chatting with Dayne Rathbone, a product researcher at Substack, about issues in academia and academic publishing, and how Substack might be able to offer a solution.
(As you’ll hear, we originally wanted to tackle the topic of free will too, prompted by an essay I wrote a while ago now, but time got the better of us…)
We begin by discussing how PhDs are actually rather easy unless the student or supervisor makes it otherwise. Universities are financially incentivised to expand the number of students ad infinitum, leading to a lowering of standards at both admission and completion of degrees—including the supposedly elite PhD degree.
Our conversation then turns from skewed financial incentives at universities to skewed financial incentives at academic journals. We discuss what journals get right and wrong, and how they exploit scientists and, ultimately, rip off tax payers.
Finally, we touch on incentives that motivate scientists, and how Substack can leverage these to usurp traditional academic journals. Dayne has been working on a pilot at Substack to index scholarly Substack articles with digital object identifiers and to have them indexed with Europe PMC and, hopefully, Google Scholar. My scholarly review on protein intake is part of this initial pilot.
If you find this discussion interesting and haven’t read my previous posts on these topics, you can find them here:
If you enjoy the conversation, I would appreciate you letting me know by way of liking it or sharing it with friends. This livestream/podcast was Dayne’s idea, but Substack has extremely an frictionless livestreaming interface, so I wouldn’t be averse to recording more interesting conversations in future if there is appetite for it—of course in addition to my written content.
