Modern science isn't a one-person affair. Few papers have single authorships nowadays because science is done in teams rather than by lone geniuses (and even in the case of Einstein it looks like his first wife, the mathematician Mileva Marić, should probably have been given co-authorships on some of those early papers). While some fields simply have authors listed in alphabetical order, many have special meaning to the first and last authors -- the first author is given to the person who supposedly contributed the most (which can be contentious; typically a grad student or post-doc) and the last author is given to the mentor of the first author.

It's been several years since I spoke to my friends who went through this, but from what I recall:

- Thread of retribution

- Claims of IP ownership, similar to how corporations in the US make claim to things developed on their time and their machinery

If you can churn out 1 paper every 3 months doing 8-5 that’s fine. The truth is that the incentive model is based on papers you published (to be subsequently used in NSF proposals). Hence, for most people that means working their ass off to churn out papers at a decent rate. I guess you could say something else is broken — like the way conferences have super low acceptance rates?

This hits close to home.