> The only way to turn this around is to change the way we give credit for scientific achievements, and stop rewarding "I wrote the grant" With authorships. (Im

> The only way to turn this around is to change the way we give credit for scientific achievements, and stop rewarding "I wrote the grant" With authorships. (Im ex faculty) I totally agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but I don't see how your proposed solution would solve anything. First of all, grants are needed to do any meaningful research and advance one's careers in most fields, authorship or no authorship. So the incentive to spend a disproportionate amount of time selling oneself would still be there. Second, as you yourself imply, the reasons why young faculty don't take a more active role in research are (mostly) not voluntary, it's because they are forced into the grant treadmill. I don't see why they deserve punishment (in the form of fewer authorships) on top of that. They're already overworked getting the grants and you want them to spend more hours in the lab to get authorships in addition? Third, how do you even police authorships? Especially when a person has a position of power due to having the funding with which other people in the lab are hired. There are already guidelines from scientific societies that in theory don't allow people who just obtained the funding to claim authorship, but people do it anyway. Even if someone complained, they can claim that they actually contributed (e.g. by going through the paper, checking and polishing for correctness) and it's very hard to disprove. I think the solution has to be to the tune of (1) funding purely based on past CV, not projects (spare us all the effort of convincing reviewers that what we're going to do is the bee's knees, and drawing fictional Gantt charts when in research it's practically impossible to predict anything. If we have produced relevant results in the past, we will probably keep producing them); (2) flatter funding (reward better CVs with better funding, but keep decent enough funding for everyone to keep feedback loops at bay and not throw people that got unlucky with experiments under the bus); and (3) individual funding for everyone instead of a large chunk of funding that goes to the head of the lab.