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In today’s budget-constrained landscape, scientists are under enormous pressure to achieve results.

Permanent jobs in academia are extremely rare. In fact, many PhD students and postdocs are forced to look elsewhere for employment, despite years of research. For those that do remain within the field, this extreme pressure creates a fierce culture of competition amongst scientists. This competition manifests itself throughout their profession, from applying for grants, a promotion, funding, or reporting measures of ‘impact’ back to their funder.

Scientists are continuously being pushed to produce measurable outputs. These might include their number of papers, citations or money from grants. But the grants for research funding are typically allocated through hyper-competitive grant proposals, and a recent study in PLOS Biology showed that these have little chance of success. The scientists’ ‘outputs’ are then evaluated by their university or funding body when considering the scientists ‘worth’. These steps take a huge amount of time and effort, which could be spent working, ultimately hindering scientific progress.

It has been well documented that the “publish or perish” culture of science provides fertile ground for errors to occur, for corners to be cut, and for scientific misconduct to take place. This can have serious consequences where lives are at stake, and seriously breaches the public’s trust in science.

Science is a collaborative enterprise, but pressure creates an invisible, but very real, wall to scientific progress. This year marks the 30 year fall of the Berlin Wall. When the world is becoming increasingly obsessed with building them, let’s break down the walls in science!