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The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.

As health care systems have been recast as innovation assets, commercial aims are increasingly prominent within states' health and medical research policies. Despite this, the reformulation of notions of social and of scientific value and of long-standing relations between science and the state that is occurring in research policies remains comparatively unexamined. Addressing this lacuna, this article investigates the articulation of 'actually existing neoliberalism' in research policy by examining a major Australian research policy and funding instrument, the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF). We identify the MRFF and allied initiatives as a site of state activism: reallocating resources from primary and preventive health care to commercially-oriented biomedical research; privileging commercial objectives in research and casting health as a "flow on effect"; reorganising the publicly funded production of health and medical knowledge; and arrogating for political actors a newly prominent role in research grant assessment and funding allocation. We conclude that rather than the state's assumption of a more activist role in medical research and innovation straightforwardly serving a 'public good', it is a driver of neoliberalisation that erodes commitments to redistributive justice in health care and significantly reconfigures science-state relations in research policy.

Global science expansion and the 'skills premium' in labor markets have been extensively discussed in the literature on the global knowledge economy, yet the focus on, broadly-speaking, knowledge-related personnel as a key factor is surprisingly absent. This article draws on UIS and OECD data on research and development (R&D) personnel for the period 1980 to 2015 for up to N = 82 countries to gauge cross-national trends and to test a wide range of educational, economic, political and institutional determinants of general expansion as well as expansion by specific sectors (i.e. higher education vs corporate R&D) and country groups (OECD vs non-OECD). Findings show that, worldwide, the number of personnel involved in the creation of novel and original knowledge has risen dramatically in the past three decades, across sectors, with only a few countries reporting decrease. Educational (public governance, tertiary enrolment and professionalization) and economic predictors (R&D expenditures and gross national income) show strong effects. Expansion is also strongest in those countries embedded in global institutional networks, yet regardless of a democratic polity. I discuss the emergence of 'knowledge work' as a mass-scale and worldwide phenomenon and map out consequences for the analysis of such a profound transformation, which involves both an educated workforce and the strong role of the state.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11024-021-09455-4.

Over the course of the 20^th century, unprecedented growth in scientific discovery was fueled by broad growth in the number of university-based scientists. During this period the American undergraduate enrollment rate and number of universities with STEM graduate programs each doubled three times and the annual volume of new PhDs doubled six times. This generated the research capacity that allowed the United States to surpass early European-dominated science production and lead for the rest of the century. Here, we focus on origins in the organizational environment and institutional dynamics instead of conventional economic factors. We argue that three trends of such dynamics in the development of American higher education not often considered together-mass undergraduate education, decentralized founding of universities, and flexible mission charters for PhD training-form a process characterized by a term coined here: access symbiosis. Then using a 90-year data series on STEM PhD production and institutional development, we demonstrate the historical progression of these mutually beneficial trends. This access symbiosis in the U.S., and perhaps versions of it in other nations, is likely one critical component of the integration of higher education development with the growing global capacity for scientific discovery. These results are discussed in terms of the contributions of American universities to the Century of Science, recent international trends, and its future viability.

There is a lack of objective evaluative standards for academic work. While this has been recognized in studies of how gatekeepers pass judgment on the works of others, little is known about how scholars deal with the uncertainty about how their work will be evaluated by gatekeepers. Building upon 35 interviews with early career academics in political science and history, this paper explores how junior scholars use appraisal devices to navigate this kind of uncertainty. Appraisal devices offer trusted and knowledgeable appraisals through which scholars are informed whether their work and they themselves are good enough to succeed in academia. Investigating how early career academics rely upon appraisals from assessors (i.e., 'academic mentors'), the study adds to existing literature on uncertainty and worth in academic life by drawing attention to how scholars' anticipatory practices are informed by trusting the judgment of others. The empirical analysis demonstrates that early career academics are confronted with multiple and conflicting appraisals that they must interpret and differentiate between. However, the institutional conditions for dealing with uncertainty about what counts in future evaluations, as well as which individuals generally come to function as assessors, differ between political science and history. This has an impact on both valuation practices and socialization structures. Focusing on what I call practices of appraisal devices, the paper provides a conceptual understanding of how scholars cope with uncertainties about their future. Furthermore, it expands existing theory by demonstrating how scholars' self-concept and desired identities are key to the reflexive ways appraisal devices are used in the course of action.

Clinician-scientists (CSs) are vital in connecting the worlds of research and practice. Yet, there is little empirical insight into how CSs perceive and act upon their in-and-between position between these socio-culturally distinct worlds. To better understand and support CSs' training and career development, this study aims to gain insight into CSs' social identity and brokerage. The authors conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 17, purposively sampled, CSs to elicit information on their social identity and brokerage. The CSs differ in how they perceive their social identity. Some CSs described their social identity strongly as either a research or clinical identity (dominant research or clinical identity). Other CSs described combined research and clinical identities, which might sometimes be compartmentalised, intersected or merged (non-dominant-identity). In the types of brokerage that they employ, all CSs act as representatives. CSs with a non-dominant identity mostly act as liaison and show considerable variability in their repertoire, including representative and gatekeeper. CSs with a dominant identity have less diversity in their brokerage types. Those with a dominant research identity typically act as a gatekeeper. Combining lenses of social identity theory and brokerage types helps understand CSs who have a dual position in-and-between the worlds of clinical practice and research. Professional development programs should explicitly address CSs' professional identities and subsequent desired brokerage. Research and policy should aim to clarify and leverage the position of CSs in-and-between research and practice.

In the current research landscape, there are increasing demands for research to be innovative and cutting-edge. At the same time, concerns are voiced that as a consequence of neoliberal regimes of research governance, innovative research becomes impeded. In this paper, I suggest that to gain a better understanding of these dynamics, it is indispensable to scrutinise current demands for innovativeness as a distinct way of ascribing worth to research. Drawing on interviews and focus groups produced in a close collaboration with three research groups from the crop and soil sciences, I develop the notion of a project-innovation regime of valuation that can be traced in the sphere of research. In this evaluative framework, it is considered valuable to constantly re-invent oneself and take 'first steps' instead of 'just' following up on previous findings. Subsequently, I describe how these demands for innovativeness relate to and often clash with other regimes of valuation that matter for researchers' practices. I show that valuations of innovativeness are in many ways bound to those of productivity and competitiveness, but that these two regimes are nevertheless sometimes in tension with each other, creating a complicated double bind for researchers. Moreover, I highlight that also the project-innovation regime as such is not always in line with what researchers considered as a valuable progress of knowledge, especially because it entails a de-valuation of certain kinds of long-term epistemic agendas. I show that prevailing pushes for innovativeness seem to be based on a rather short-sighted temporal imaginary of scientific progress that is hardly grounded in the complex realities of research practices, and that they can reshape epistemic practices in potentially problematic ways.

Leaders of the scientific community have declared that American science is in a crisis due to inadequate federal funding. They misconstrue the problem; its roots lie instead in the institutional interactions between federal funding agencies and higher education. After World War II, science policy elites advocated for a system of funding that addressed what they perceived at the time as their most pressing problems of science-government relations: the need for greater federal funding for science, especially to universities, while maintaining scientific autonomy in the distribution and use of those funds. The agencies that fund university research developed institutional rules, norms, and procedures that created unintended consequences when they interacted with those of American higher education. The project system for funding, justified by peer-review and coupled with rapidly increasing R&D budgets, created incentives for universities to expand their research programs massively, which led to unsustainable growth in the demand for federal research money. That system produced spectacular successes but also created the unintended longer-term problem that demand for science funding has grown more quickly than government funding ever could. Most analysts neglect potentially painful reforms that might address these problems. This case demonstrates that successful political coalitions can create intractable long-term problems for themselves.

The agencies of the government of the United States of America, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, intervene in American society through the collection, processing, and diffusion of information. The Presidency of Barack Obama was notable for updating and redesigning the US government's information infrastructure. The White House enhanced mass consultation through open government and big data initiatives to evaluate policy effectiveness, and it launched new ways of communicating with the citizenry. In this essay we argue that these programs spelled out an emergent epistemology based on two assumptions: dispersed knowledge and a critique of judgment. These programs have redefined the evidence required to justify and design regulatory policy and conferred authority to a new kind of expert, which we call epistemic consultants.

This article compares the career trajectories and mobility patterns of Nobel Laureates in economics with those of highly cited sociologists to evaluate a theory advanced by Richard Whitley that postulates a nexus between the overall intellectual structure of a discipline and the composition of its elite. The theory predicts that the most eminent scholars in internally fragmented disciplines such as sociology will vary in their departmental affiliations and academic career paths, while disciplines such as economics with strong linkages between specialties and shared standards of excellence will be dominated by a more homogeneous elite. The comparison provides strong empirical evidence in favor of Whitley's theory. The careers of the most eminent economists are closely tied to the top five departments of the discipline, whereas the career pathways to eminence in sociology are largely unpredictable.