Today, most science is funded by government agencies, like the NIH. This means, bureaucrats who know nothing about science allocate other people's money to research they don't care about. Since they don't understand the research, they need objective measures of "research quality", and they picked number of publications and impact factor of the journals as measures. What you measure becomes your objective, and we got "publish or perish" and all sorts of scientific misconduct.
Is there anything you disagree with? Or do you simply dislike the conclusion?
Five million euro of tax payer money have been blown on a Neanderthal genome. All we got out of it is a hyper sensitive analysis that picked up an artifact (source: first hand experience with the raw data) and called it admixture. But it's a high profile publication thanks to the catchy headline and more tax payer money flows in the same direction.
This wouldn't have happened if the bureaucrats who presided over the grant money knew anything about the science and looked into the methods. Or maybe it would have happened anyway, because this was never science but just a publicity stunt. Either way, funding "science" this way is bad.
Today, most science is funded by government agencies, like the NIH. This means, bureaucrats who know nothing about science allocate other people's money to research they don't care about. Since they don't understand the research, they need objective measures of "research quality", and they picked number of publications and impact factor of the journals as measures. What you measure becomes your objective, and we got "publish or perish" and all sorts of scientific misconduct.
Science needs a free market, too.