In one study in the US, it was estimated that scientists spent on average around 8 per cent of their total working time and 19 per cent of their research time writing grant applications

From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 178.   

There are reasons to think otherwise. Perhaps the most notorious example of a worrisome incentive in science is the cash-for-publications scheme. Since the early 1990s, Chinese universities have had a policy of paying scientists (at least those in the natural sciences) a cash bonus for every paper they publish in mainstream, international scientific journals. The full details are unclear – one of the more comprehensive studies notes that many of the payment arrangements are kept secret – but the basic idea is that the cash reward increases as a function of the prestige of the journal where the paper is published, increasing substantially for the very high-end outlets.  If a scientist gets a paper into Nature or Science, they can, at least at some Chinese universities, look forward to a reward many times their annual salary. 

 

This policy in China appears to be the most widespread and potentially lucrative, but versions of the same direct cash-for-publication scheme have been reported as government policy in Turkey and South Korea, and at certain universities in other countries, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, Italy and the UK.  Paying by the paper sits very uneasily with the Mertonian norm of disinterestedness: scientists are not supposed to be in this game for their own pecuniary interests. 

 

The direct cash-for-publication scheme is among the more gauche policies that universities use to encourage scientists to publish as often as possible, but researchers are also under many subtler – yet still keenly felt – financial pressures. In the academic job market, hiring and promotion decisions are based in no small part on how many publications you have on your CV, and in which journals they’re published. Publish too few papers, and publish them in too-obscure outlets, and you’ve a far lower chance of getting or retaining a job. In the American system, tenure – what happens when an assistant professor, the lowest rank in the academic faculty system, becomes an associate professor, and is at that point essentially guaranteed a job for life – is decided in large part using the same kinds of productivity measures. 

 

Why, you might wonder, do universities prioritise this publication-based measure over others that might have more to do with the quality of research – for example, whether a scientist’s work meet standards like randomisation or blinding, or even replicability? The answer is “that they’re subject to financial pressures as well. In many countries, including the UK, universities themselves are ranked by the government on the prestige of the papers their academics produce, with taxpayers’ money divvied up accordingly.  All of this is what gives rise to the clichéd phrase ‘publish or perish’: keep cranking out the papers, and in the most impressive journals you can, or you’ll never survive in the massively competitive world of modern academia. 

It’s not just papers, either. We’ve previously seen that the first, necessary step on the road to doing a scientific study is usually getting a grant to pay for equipment, materials, data access, participant rewards and staff salaries. This means that scientists constantly need to be applying for grants to keep their research alive. And again, universities experience the same pressure. They take a slice of whatever grant money their scientists manage to win and use it to subsidise teaching, hiring, building maintenance, and so on.  For that reason, they lean heavily on their academics to bring in the cash. In one study in the US, it was estimated that scientists spent on average around 8 per cent of their total working time and 19 per cent of their research time writing grant applications – and those both sound to me like rather low estimates.