Trust and trustworthiness are crucial for science: equally for the scientific knowledge, scientific institutions and scientific community. For scientific knowledge the main criterion of trustworthiness is the search for truth, for scientific institutions it is the regime of autonomy, and for scientific community – respecting the ethos of science: norms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism (peer review and meritocracy). In the traditional academic science due to these criteria the level of deviance (fraud, plagiarism etc.) was very low. Alas in current post-academic science we witness numerous occurrence of fake knowledge, loss of autonomy of academic institutions and the neglect of the ethos of science among scholars. There are several processes responsible for this condition: fiscalisation, privatization, marketization, bureaucratization, and the pressure of non-academic, external forces and interests on scientific community. The regaining of autonomy and reactivation of academic culture (primarily the ethos of science), are the preconditions for overcoming the current crisis of trustworthiness in science.

We examined the male-female collaboration practices of all internationally visible Polish university professors (N = 25,463) based on their Scopus-indexed publications from 2009–2018 (158,743 journal articles). We merged a national registry of 99,935 scientists with the Scopus publication database, using probabilistic and deterministic record linkage. Our database (“The Polish Science Observatory”) included all professors with at least a doctoral degree employed in 85 researchinvolved universities. We determined an “individual publication portfolio” for every professor. The gender homophily principle (publishing predominantly with scientists of the same sex) was found to apply to male scientists — but not to females. The majority of male scientists collaborate solely with males; most female scientists, in contrast, do not collaborate with females at all. Gender homophily in research-intensive institutions proved stronger for males than for females. Finally, we used a multi-dimensional fractional logit regression model to estimate the impact of gender and other individual-level and institutional-level independent variables on gender homophily in research collaboration.

Twenty five years ago John Ziman formulated the thesis that academic science and industrial science merge into one system of post-academic and at the same time post-industrial science, in which the Mertonian norms of academic science expressed by the acronym CUDOS ( communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized scepticism) give way to the norms of industrial science expressed by the acronym PLACE ( proprietary, local, authoritarian, commissioned, expert). In this article, I defend the thesis that this system has evolved into a system of academic industrial science, the norms of which can be expressed with the acronym PRICE: patron relevant, innovative, competitive, econometrical. Thus, reforming academic science is also its re-norming in terms of both ethics and the organization of research. The ethics of scientific research is transformed into the ethics of knowledge production. Scientific institutions are seen as producers of knowledge which is an “epistemic commodity.” A particular of knowledge is needed when it satisfies the needs of “consumers.” Scientists are then „elements” of the knowledge production process, and the process itself is subject to market calculations. This does not undermine the epistemic value of a given research project and its results, but it leads to controversial consequences, including fragmentation and aspectualization of knowledge, linking research directions with the interests of social powers, and ignoring transformative criticism. As a result, sometimes what was treated in the Mertonian science as a threat or an offense against the ethos of science turns out to be the rational behavior of an entrepreneur operating on the market of epistemic goods and services. Academic industrial science is also unable to fulfil non-instrumental roles in society (shaping worldviews, supporting social rationality, providing independent experts) that academic science performed. Attempts to prevent these problems or threats will be doomed to failure in advance, because countermeasures are based on a different understanding of knowledge itself.