DrEvanGowan

koen_hufkens , 5 months ago to academicchatter

Does anyone else take issue with, or have profound concerns about, platform science?

For clarity, it refers to the tendency the last decade for science to be organized into top down meta level networks (which at times, or more often than not, share a political and economic reality not to dissimilar to market based platform economics).

#AcademicChatter #AcademicMastodon

@academicchatter

DrEvanGowan , 5 months ago

@koen_hufkens @academicchatter Yeah, I have to agree, I am not sure what you mean by "platform science" or "meta level networks". I have never encountered these terms before.

DrEvanGowan , 5 months ago

@koen_hufkens @academicchatter I am still not sure if I fully understand, but in my field (Earth sciences), most work is still very decentralized. Generally speaking, even organized activities (e.g. climate model intercomparisons) are still done in a very ad hoc way, giving large degrees of freedom to each research group on how they approach the problem.

DrEvanGowan , 5 months ago

@koen_hufkens @academicchatter I think that in my field this is not really an issue, because there is such little funding in general that no one has the resources consolidate everything into one place like that. For example, there is no centralized database of geological evidence of past sea level variations (something that is very much needed to assess future potential sea level rise) - I am having to compile it myself.

DrEvanGowan , 5 months ago

@koen_hufkens @academicchatter Haha, I haven't even been able to convince anyone to give me a job to do this, let alone make it something that could be monetized. Even though my database is fully open on Github and described in a highly cited paper that I published 3 years ago, I do not know of anyone else using it.

DrEvanGowan , 10 months ago to random

Since I am planning to delete my Twitter account soon, I am slowly deleting every post I made manually, so I can see what I posted (I also do not trust that they will delete the posts if I delete the account). A large portion of my replies are congratulating people on things like their newly published paper, graduating, getting a grant, etc. These kind of posts are what I miss about Twitter, and I hope more people come and post their successes on Mastodon. #AcademicChatter

DrEvanGowan OP , 10 months ago

@yetiinabox I have been effectively off Twitter since last November. I agree, the vibe is much nicer! But, I would say there are far fewer academics. They will come, I think. :)