for her PhD at the University of Vienna. It focused on the career aspirations
and working practices of postdoctoral research fellows in the life sciences.
“It’s a complicated moment in their careers and they find themselves in
a bottleneck, competing for the few senior positions that are available,”
says Dr. Müller.
“They often end up in a loop of doing one postdoc after another. It all
becomes about outpacing [their peers] and producing output” in order to
impress hiring committees and funding agencies with publication num-
bers and impact factors. As a consequence, she says, “there is no time to
develop other skills. How to teach, how to communicate your research to
the public – these things get pushed to the margins.”
She says the trend is causing “collateral damage” to the culture of
science. “Young researchers aren’t rewarded for activities that are essential
to the running of an effective lab – fostering teamwork, for instance, or
helping newcomers get acclimatized.”
Many of the concerns expressed by slow science proponents in Europe
resonate with their academic peers in Canada. Françoise Baylis, who
holds the Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie
University, concurs with the Slow Science Academy’s view that “science
develops unsteadily, with jerky moves and unpredictable leaps forward.”
Dr. Baylis believes the Canadian government is pushing science in a
very different direction, one that emphasizes university-based research
that offers potential commercial benefits. She notes that the National
Research Council of Canada will now focus more of its efforts on the
commercialization of science and that the original Networks of Centres
of Excellence have been followed by more business-oriented initiatives
like the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research.
“All long-term complex research, especially interdisciplinary research,
that does not aim to produce widgits is at risk,” says Dr. Baylis. “The problem
is the government’s pervasive focus on ‘deliverables.’”
Benoit-Antoine Bacon, the dean of arts and science at Bishop’s
University, says that slow science proponents have raised some legitimate
“Any thinking scientist has to have
a mix of projects. Some will have
a reasonable chance of working out
and some will be long shots.”
concerns. “Few would dispute that the way funding is allocated has put a
premium on the number of publications,” says Dr. Bacon, a neuropsycholo-
gist, “if only because evaluating the quantity of publications is significantly
easier than evaluating their quality.”
Some advocates of the slow science movement argue that evaluation
based on numbers leads researchers to dampen their ambitions: scientists
play it safe and choose simpler projects to pursue, ones that will generate
papers without too much fuss, rather than risk years on a tough problem
that might not pan out.
