Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.
If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.
And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.
He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.
In the words of Sydney Brenner (a biologist, it’s in the article): the system is “corrupt”.
He basically turned science, which used to be boring (“Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs”), into a big business (“There are tales of parties on the roof of the Athens Hilton, of gifts of Concorde flights, of scientists being put on a chartered boat tour of the Greek islands to plan their new journal.”).
If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.
And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.
In the words of Sydney Brenner (a biologist, it’s in the article): the system is “corrupt”.
He basically turned science, which used to be boring (“Scientific conferences tended to be drab, low-ceilinged affairs”), into a big business (“There are tales of parties on the roof of the Athens Hilton, of gifts of Concorde flights, of scientists being put on a chartered boat tour of the Greek islands to plan their new journal.”).