Goals of science vs Goals of scientists (& a love letter to PLOS One)

This monster post has been sitting on my computer hard-drive for a few months (seriously). For awhile, I was too scared to publish it. What I’ve written below is based on a (very) informal talk I gave at a graduate student seminar series at University of Maryland. To get the gist, the slides for that talk are below (all the way down) or here.

It’s also based on my stewing thoughts in response to dozens of conversations I’ve had about science and academia over the last year or so. My question is: does being a “good academic” and being a “good scientist” ever conflict? And if so, how often? And more importantly, can we fix academia (or science) to eliminate this conflict?

I’ll get to that in a moment, but I’m going to start with a related discussion of the journal PLOS One. If you are thinking…