With over 10 million active researchers and about two million scientific articles published every year, contemporary science is undergoing a deep transformation that is changing established procedures, ethical principles, and verification mechanisms. From a vocation of few, motivated and inspired, science has become a profession for many, perhaps too many, who often have few original ideas and a lot of need to emerge. “From passion to market”, is the subheading of Gianfranco Pacchioni’s book, Research Pro-Rector at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Scienza, Quo Vadis, Il Mulino, p.146, 11€). “During my PhD in Berlin – says Pacchioni – I regularly read the Journal of Physical Chemistry.
At that time, the maga-zine published a dos-sier every two weeks, and in a year it put together less than 4,000 pages. Today it consists of four parts, each devoted to a sub-sector of physical chemistry, publishing nearly 200 files per year, for a total of 60,000 pages. Today, the amount of infor-mation produced is much higher than what can be read, digested, and used.
Scientific research remains key to address the great challenges that humanity faces. And the world of science -continues Pacchioni- has robust internal control and verification mechanisms. The problem is the social cost of research, and how much the user will be willing to pay for low-value, never-mentioned, often unreproducible, and sometimes even copied research. It is therefore necessary to change the evaluation mechanisms, increasingly focusing on quality rather than quantity, and rediscover the fundamental aspects of good scientific research. Time is needed to discuss, reflect, understand, and even to make mistakes. All things that are being lost today, under the extreme pressure that requires to publish any results obtained.
