Not All Scientists pay to be Scientists
By Henry Sauermann, Michael Roach. 2014
110 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A growing body of research on firms’ “open science” strategies rests on the notion that scientists have a strong preference for publishing and that firms are able to extract a wage discount if they allow scientists to publish. Drawing on a survey of 1,400 life scientists about to enter the job market, we suggest an alternative view. First, we show significant heterogeneity in the price scientists assign to the opportunity to publish in firms, and those scientists who seek industry careers have particularly low preferences for publishing. Thus, many job applicants are not willing to accept lower wages for jobs that let them publish and firms pursuing open science strategies may instead have to pay publishing incentives that fulfill both sorting and incentive functions. Second, we show that scientists with higher ability have a higher price of publishing but also expect to be paid higher wages regardless of the publishing regime. Thus, they are not cheaper to hire than other scientists if allowed to publish, but they are more expensive if publishing is restricted. Finally, we show that scientists publish not simply for “peer recognition” but also for more specific reasons, including the opportunity to advance science or to move to higher-paying jobs. Different reasons predict what price a scientist assigns to the opportunity to publish and may also have very different implications for the sustainability of competitive advantages derived from open science strategies.
Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3916ff328a8e5d276ea4195d9a39bcf7831d0c02
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Citations in the corpus
- Open Access to Data: An Ideal Professed but Not Practised (2014, background): “Sauermann and Roach (2014) find that a stronger aste for science, e.g., for contributing to the expansion of public nowledge, significantly increases the personal value of publishng.”
- Flying the nest: how the home department shapes researchers’ career paths (2017, unknown): “Sauermann and Roach (2014), for example, find that 4 those from highly ranked PhD programs give higher importance to publishing.”