All I understand is research scientists do some research and publish a paper. Do they get for the publishing? Or is it all grant based for wherever they are researching at? What about a philosophy major? Where would they even work, and get paid for what?
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I’m a research scientist, but I work in industry right now. So I work for a company, they pay me to do research and their hope is that research will lead to either a new product or an improvement to an existing one.
In academia you’ll be getting your funding from elsewhere. It might be a company, a grant, the government or somewhere else. And funding means money to pay for a variety of things, whether it be new lab equipment, grad students, chemicals, travel to some conference.
I’m assuming your asking about academic scientists who work at colleges and universities.
The answer is, it depends.
Most full-time, science professors get paid a salary by the university, and it’s probably less than you think. a lot of professors make $50,000 – 100,000 per year. There are highschool teachers in some states that make more than some professors.
Research is a required part of the job, so they don’t get paid extra for that. They apply for grants to fund their research. Some of that money can be used to pay their own salary, but there are limits on how much, especially with government grants. Some of it goes to the university to pay for the expenses of maintaining the research facilities and buildings. the rest of it gets spent on equipment and supplies, do experiments, and get data. Then they publish the data in academic journals.
Some professors have what are called “soft money” positions. The university doesn’t pay them at all. Their whole salary comes from grant money, and they basically use grant money to rent their lab space from the university. If they don’t get grants, they get fired. But if they’re really good at getting grants and doing research, they can make quite a bit of money. They usually don’t have to teach much, sometimes not at all.
But the really crazy part is that they don’t get paid by those journals when they publish an article. In fact, they often have to pay the journals a fee if their article is accepted for publication.
And someone has to review each article and decide if it’s any good. Usually, that’s other professors who know the topic well. And they don’t get paid to review the articles!
And the journal publishers charge for access to the published articles!
imagine a company that charges people to create content, charges other people to edit and evaluate that content, and then charges people to access that content.
Sounds crazy? That’s because it is.
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