How Academia and Academic Publishing are Hindering Scientific Innovation

this articles :
How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner

featured by ECW is absolutely shocking, and sadly follow many other's scientists denunciations (as you can read inside).
ECW cite few good quotes, but there is much more:

Quote from "Sydney Brenner"

To have seen the development of a subject, which was looked upon with disdain by the establishment from the very start, actually become the basis of our whole approach to biology today. That is something that was worth living for.

This one give an explanation of the LENR Fiasco, by contrast

Quote from "Sydney Brenner"

I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. Because I think ignorance in science is very important. If you’re like me and you know too much you can’t try new things. I always work in fields of which I’m totally ignorant.

This quote chosen by ECW is really resonating with LENR at F&P time:

Quote from "Sydney Brenner"

What people don’t realise is that at the beginning, it was just a handful of people who saw the light, if I can put it that way. So it was like belonging to an evangelical sect, because there were so few of us, and all the others sort of thought that there was something wrong with us.

They weren’t willing to believe. Of course they just said, well, what you’re trying to do is impossible.

As I say often this reactions is classic, jut worse today, as he denounce later.

The hard explanations continue, describing the Scientific system today:

Quote from "Sydney Brenner"

Today the Americans have developed a new culture in science based on the slavery of graduate students. Now graduate students of American institutions are afraid. He just performs. He’s got to perform. The post-doc is an indentured labourer. We now have labs that don’t work in the same way as the early labs where people were independent, where they could have their own ideas and could pursue them.

The most important thing today is for young people to take responsibility, to actually know how to formulate an idea and how to work on it. Not to buy into the so-called apprenticeship. I think you can only foster that by having sort of deviant studies. That is, you go on and do something really different. Then I think you will be able to foster it.

But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow the straight and narrow.

There’s no exploration any more except in a very few places.

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The interviewer remind us that he is not the only scientist to critic current Science:

Quote from "Elizabeth Dzeng"

Our discussion made me think about what we consider markers of success today. It reminded me of a paragraph in Professor Brenner’s tribute to Professor Sanger in Science:

I found this particularly striking given that another recent Nobel prize winner, Peter Higgs, who identified the particle that bears his name, the Higgs boson, similarly remarked in an interview with the Guardian that,

It is alarming that so many Nobel Prize recipients have lamented that they would never have survived this current academic environment. What are the implications of this on the discovery of future scientific paradigm shifts and scientific inquiry in general? I asked Professor Brenner to elaborate.

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Brenner answer clearly:

Quote from "Sydney Brenner"

He wouldn’t have survived. It is just the fact that he wouldn’t get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments, but they’ve never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what’s he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal.

So you know we now have these performance criteria, which I think are just ridiculous in many ways. But of course this money has to be apportioned, and our administrators love having numbers like impact factors or scores.

So clearly applying to Cold Fusion... except that it is replicated, published in peer-review journals, but nobody believe it is, so they will say the same bad excuse.

He continue with a harsh critics against peer-review that ECW emphasized too:

Quote from "Sydney Brenner"

And of course all the academics say we’ve got to have peer review. But I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean.

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals.

Now I mean, people are trying to do something, but I think it’s not publish or perish, it’s publish in the okay places [or perish]. And this has assembled a most ridiculous group of people. I wrote a column for many years in the nineties, in a journal called Current Biology. In one article, “Hard Cases”, I campaigned against this [culture] because I think it is not only bad, it’s corrupt. In other words it puts the judgment in the hands of people who really have no reason to exercise judgment at all.

This section of the interview resonate with Randy Shekman call to boycott high-impact journals
Nobel Winner Boycott Science Journals

Quote

Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.