Ivory Towers of Entitlement?: The Commercialisation of Academic Palaeontologists

Abstract

Palaeontology suffers from divisions amongst its community, along an ostensibly motivational division between academic and commercial palaeontologists, the former not being motivated financially, unlike the latter. These divisions are particularly polarised in the United States of America. In order to discuss why this attitude exists, even when the financial division is no longer so clear, two factors are addressed: 1, latent entitlement attitudes inherent in the academic culture; 2, the commercialisation of academic palaeontology through the incentivisation of publishing, using the Chinese experience of scientific publishing as a microcosm for palaeontology globally. These factors are then dealt with as underpinning patterns of unethical - and sometimes even illegal - behaviour by academic palaeontologists.