Points 1-4 seem to be promoting a vision of individual researchers working independently with low cost instruments. A sort of yeoman farmer model of research?
Why not aggregate those independent researchers into a single place so that they can share ideas and the cost of high quality instruments? Like a university.
Also, I don't disagree with any of these ideas, I just don't think they're relevant in a university setting, at least in the US. Most universities have good libraries with access to all the luxury journals. They have core facilities with high quality equipment. There's some red-tape but you can study just about any chemical in a university lab.
Edit: I should note that the current journal publishing system is a terrible fucking scam and should be immediately dismantled. That said, it's not currently limiting my research because everyone at my university shares in the extortion fees charged by publishers.
Oh, universities are great! I'm not saying universities should stop existing or that they aren't important. They're very important! But we can't expect them to provide unlimited resources for free to anyone who is curious about something. They have to pick and choose who they fund, which means excluding the majority of possible Karikós. Perhaps just as bad, the mechanism consigns many of the most promising researchers to administrative tasks like grantwriting and personnel management instead of science. If you're a PI supervising 30 RAs you aren't going to spend a lot of time at the bench.
And most women who get a Ph.D. sacrifice the chance to have kids in their 20s in the process, which is a big deal for many of them; life isn't easy for "nontraditional" postdocs.
And 95% of people don't live in the US.
Finally, universities aren't omnipotent. Gang Chen, David Gelernter, Aaron Swartz, Steve Kurtz, Star Simpson, and Majid Shahriari were all affiliated with universities, and they were persecuted for their research anyway, resulting in their deaths in two cases.
Also, many of the measures I suggest would substantially ease the path of researchers who want to form a new institution to pool resources, such as a hackerspace or a mail-order DNA synthesis company.
So, I think giving people more freedom to pursue research as they see fit would substantially increase the amount of research that gets done, and so would placing more social value on it.
The literal problem in the article is that those who might make the largest contributions are currently excluded from university organized research due to politics (entrenched and powerful researchers and inflexible policy), discrimination (not just the standard forms of race or sex, but also based on education), or other arbitrary reasons! You’re just saying “the current way is the most efficient” and discarding the entirety of the GP comments 5 points above you.
Citizen science can definitely be a thing, but it's going to have very different comparative advantages than anything based around established institutions, i.e. universities/research labs. It might well be that both of these are worthwhile problems to solve - they need not be exclusive.
Agreed, but I really object to the term "citizen science". It simultaneously implies that academic professionals aren't citizens and that the political question of citizenship (as opposed to, say, statelessness or nationality in a monarchy) is a necessary prerequisite to doing amateur science, or at least for doing it well.
I think it's likely that improving the options for non-institutional researchers will improve the situation for institutional researchers as well, among other things because it improves their BATNA in negotiations with institutional forces.
I'm not endorsing the term, but it's the established term of art for what you're talking about. "Amateur science" in particular has its own implications of shoddy, low-quality work, so that's out too. And "Gentleman scientist", which is the most historically accurate in many ways, is just too classist and sexist for modern sensibilities!
The "Amateur Scientist" column in Scientific American wasn't about shoddy, low-quality work (though it often was about making do with substandard apparatus), and neither is Bill Beaty's wonderful http://amasci.com/, nor are "radio amateurs" known for shoddy, low-quality work, so I think that term might be salvageable. Beaty's site suggests "science hobbyist" as well.
Probably none of "amateur scientist", "science hobbyist", or "citizen scientist" is good enough to serve as a reasonable reputational BATNA for professors considering leaving a university. "Independent researcher", maybe?
In the research literature I very rarely see references to "scientists"; that's mostly confined to the vulgar press. Instead it talks about "researchers", "workers", "investigators", or "authors", or until recently "philosophers". So from a shibboleth perspective "citizen scientist" is pretty bad; if you say "I'm a citizen scientist" you're implicitly contradicting your claim of membership by using the exonym.
The real BATNA for professors at a university is a job in the private sector, where PhD's and professorships are a valuable credential and 'independent' publication as part of research reports, etc. might still be possible. More independent research is all well and good, but it would not alter that arrangement significantly.
That's what the BATNA is right now, but it's disastrous from the perspective of public welfare because it requires you to dedicate most of your mental energy to the job.
Good luck studying things like cocaine, MDMA, or DMT without a bunch of paperwork and likely denials by the DEA for arbitrary reasons. I hope you like waiting if you want to apply to use these compounds. It should be noted that MAPS had to sue because the DEA was dragging their feet.
Why not aggregate those independent researchers into a single place so that they can share ideas and the cost of high quality instruments? Like a university.
Also, I don't disagree with any of these ideas, I just don't think they're relevant in a university setting, at least in the US. Most universities have good libraries with access to all the luxury journals. They have core facilities with high quality equipment. There's some red-tape but you can study just about any chemical in a university lab.
Edit: I should note that the current journal publishing system is a terrible fucking scam and should be immediately dismantled. That said, it's not currently limiting my research because everyone at my university shares in the extortion fees charged by publishers.