This is rather unfortunate and upsetting. I would be certain a student was severely punished for plagiarism--in this case the paying for someone else's writing. Although I do feel the single biggest threat to science is the contest put forth by administrative entities that depend on impact factors to decide the worth of a scientist. Would you judge a students worth based off of a GPA alone? I hope not as these are found to determine a students demographic information and tells you nothing of academic skills other than the ability to take an exam well--there is plenty of research in this area; please look into it! For those of us that didn't pay our way through, I can assure grad school is a difficult job if not the most difficult job requiring teaching and research, which results often in 14 hour days and no breaks on weekends. Not many people would work 60-70 hours a week on that salary, i.e., no overtime pay. Another observation made here is that those of us that do well typically knew how to roll up our sleeves before hand.
Not only does this number not represent a scientist worth but also encourages the quick and dirty publishing in 'journals' such as Science Magazine and Nature--the impact factor for these are high. We call these articles 'tabloid science' and often say that they don't count (unfortunately they do for impact factors), and these articles usually result in the real paper being published a couple years later. There is also a way that they count social media popularization and use this against scientific employment as well, and this results in pornographic titles and subjects. We often reach for the stars when basic observations on our planet have yet to be mentioned.
Impact factors play a huge role in employment. I am a scientist and can assure you I do not have a desire for anything over 35k a year. This will also mean I will be paying student loans and left with little, but I don't care as I love what I do. Many others are like this as well, but definitely make more. We don't get any benefits from grants other than spending available for research supplies--if you go outside of this or try taking money, you can say goodbye to your career. This is unfortunately competitive as funding is limited by government. Donations help alot, but the majority of funding is governmental. Drop the subjects space or climate change in a grant, likelihood of obtaining funds probably increases.
I too believe that science should be made available to all, and I think the best way to achieve a cleaner community is to distribute spending to all, ridding the system of impact factors, and most importantly of all, promoting and teaching scientific literacy to those at the high school level. Scientific literacy and availability of articles would alleviate the need for popular science.
On a side note, please don't refer to climate change as a 'minor' temperature change--I think you were trying to make a point using this but wasn't entirely sure and apologize if it was satire. As someone who studies the past, I would suggest anyone do more reading here.
Although there are problems I can assure you some of us fight the good fight, and I won't stop.
I can't applaud this enough. Exactly my thoughts.
Thank you for mentioning this. Many people seem to ignore how popular subjects that tend to be politically inflated get all the money
I was making satire since Mar's environment will much harder to control.
Thank you for the replies, @kyriacos. Also, I sincerely appreciate the satire.
you are welcome
One thing that I failed to mention:
Publishing companies are the reason scientific articles are not available to all. They used to serve as a mediator of peer review and editing alone; they do still serve this purpose, but scientist must pay to publish. Publishing companies then charge non-paying members an often high fee to view the article. This is a double whammy that no one enjoys. And no, we get no monetary reward for views, etc. We simply get to keep our jobs.
I know. Experienced it for a while.