• Question: What don’t u like about science?

    Asked by anon-195857 on 18 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by anon-195744, anon-195750.
    • Photo: Laura Nolan

      Laura Nolan answered on 18 Jan 2019:

      The main thing that I don’t like about science is having to apply for funding (grants). The success rate can be quite low and the amount of work that has to go into preparing these grants is often a lot, so it often feels a bit like an uphill (but unfortunately necessary) battle!

    • Photo: Reka Nagy

      Reka Nagy answered on 18 Jan 2019:

      I don’t like that some resources like scientific papers or data that someone has produced is not always freely available, and is either entirely inaccessible or kept behind paywalls.
      I think this is entirely unfair, especially since most research is funded by public money – so the public should have access to it.
      So should other researchers – we need to build on each other’s work, otherwise we’d keep doing the same things over and over again. This is very frustrating but there are improvements being made and funders are starting to require that any work resulting from their grants be made open-access!

    • Photo: David Howard

      David Howard answered on 18 Jan 2019:

      It can take a while for research to be published and in some cases it can take years. This potentially slows down scientific progress and means that work could be repeated unnecessarily.

    • Photo: Kevin Daly

      Kevin Daly answered on 18 Jan 2019:

      Your position as a Scientist can be quite uncertain as you have to apply for grants every year or so to fund your salary and research. Also these grants are usually short, and you are often expected to move country or institution, which can add a lot of moving into your life.

    • Photo: Judith Sleeman

      Judith Sleeman answered on 1 Feb 2019:

      Constantly being told ‘you’re not good enough’! Grants being turned down, papers rejected as per the other answers. Rejected grants are the worst, I think, as they can take months to prepare and can’t easily be submitted elsewhere if they get turned down. You can send papers to other journals once they’ve been turned down by one, but it is frustrating and takes a long time to get the work ‘out there’. The uncertainty of short-term contracts is not a problem for me any more, but it certainly is a huge deal for many of my younger colleagues and having to move two jobs to the same place at the same time can cause huge disruptions to people’s lives.

      The science itself is great: the way we ‘do’ science could use some work!

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