Free-riding in Science

Free-riders are the individuals who intend to enjoy the success on others’ credits.  Often,scientific community suffers from ethical issues, which might be a direct or indirect consequence of free-riding. I express different scenarios of free-riding and discuss how it could be alarmingly dangerous for scientific community.

Nowhere do we see the extent of intellectual freedom that is entertained in scientific research. This positively feeds the science by attracting innovative brains willing to take up challenges. Intellectual discussions leading to ideation followed up by  co-operation and flawless execution serve as a central dogma in scientific operations. However, real world is never perfect and rather operates in noisy manner. Certain individuals have tendency to exploit the system for their self-interest by their clever but rather apparent tricks. We term these individuals as free riders and discuss how these could create panic atmosphere locally in the individual lab and sometimes globally spread across the whole department or unit of a scientific institution.

When the student is free-rider

This, probably, is the most common scenario among the three. Students interested in job and salary rather than science are common in scientific community. In the lack of scientific interest and enthusiasm, these students are merely free-riders of their colleagues and PI.  Sliding in the authorships with the insignificant or sometimes no contribution is not something unheard. A soft and over-generous PI could also escalate such free-riding. Do such freee riders suffer? I personally know the sufficient number of examples, where they did not. Once a free-rider is able to manage a decent CV and land him/herself to a faculty position, where is the suffering? A free-riding student transform into a free-riding PI and virtue continues. 

When the PI is free-rider

It might sound weird to some because of the fact that it is difficult to make out whether it is free-riding or the smartness of the PI. While the same might sound quite familiar to others who came across such individuals repeatedly.  A PI can be termed as free-rider when it thrives inappropriately onto students and collaborators  rather than on own ideas and efforts.  However, being a commander of the unit, PI could often escape or go unnoticed by many.  Moreover, a PI could cover up the free-riding by the weight of publications and other scientific accomplishments which themselves are inappropriately credited.  Though it is hard to distinguish the trade-mark features in the every-day behavior of PI being free-rider, it becomes apparent if followed closely for a reasonable duration.  Number of publications per year speaks a lot. Its not totally unheard of  a PI having 30-40 publications per year on average, which suggest that he/she submits paper on weekly basis and that too in their leisure time because they are part of important national/international committees, editors of journals, directors of institutes or grant agencies.  Several other traits could  in fact differ person to person and sometimes  strikingly contrasts to each other.  For example, such a PI could be highly communicative to certain ‘useful’ students to extract the ideas and getting the things done and later on not crediting the student appropriately for the same. Credit then either is taken by the PI itself or by a beloved student of PI if nepotism operates. In contrast, the PI could also be a highly non-communicative; a sign of incompetence; leaves the students on their own and eventually takes the credit as corresponding author of the work initiated, executed and written solely by student (s). Such student-PI relationship is often a suffering for the student and sometimes for the PI when the student turns out to be a bold and fearless ‘punisher’. A PI may also feed on some of collaborators and surprisingly on completely unknown people. Collaborators might sense the free-riding and may not collaborate with the these free-riders for long.  Such PIs, thus, rotate their collaborators and generally do not have long term collaborators.  Interestingly, free-riding PIs might also demand authorships on the articles they review by personally contacting the authors. Though, there is no estimate for such scientific misconducts due to lack of  public declarations, based on surveys it is often seen that a significant percentage of scientists do not mind crediting non-contributing authors(Roger Croll, The Noncontributing Author: An Issue of Credit and Responsibility, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 27, 3. 1984). Ever-increasing trend of more authors per article also helps free-riding PIs to slide in easily. Moreover, having the power to hire and fire, it is unlikely that a PI gets punished by the student. 

When the PI and the student both are free-riders

Though rare, the most dangerous scenario is when PI and student(s) both are free-riders. The situation might get panic and tense due to regular bashing and severe lack of productivity. I have seen scenario, where students trapped in such situations, move to other labs after wasting a couple of years. Students have such options of volatility, PIs don't and are left with no options than waiting for a good student.              

Uncontrolled free-riding

In the age of big data collaboratory science, if a PI is part of a consortium, his/her students easily make to articles coming out of consoritum with or without any contribution.  PIs do not mind including students without significant contribution because they need to shape their students' career too. There is no mechanism to assess the constribution of each author as of now. As more and more such consortia projects stem in future, such free-riding will not be under any control unless a robust mechanism is introduced.