FRENCH SCIENTISTS CREATE ‘CAMILLE NOUS’ AS AUTHOR IN PROTEST

For a year now, the world of research has seen the emergence of a new signature at the bottom of more than 200 scientific articles: Camille Noûs. He - or she - signs articles in molecular biology such as geography, physics, or socio-economics. Is it a new multidisciplinary genius like the scientists of the 19th century?

Not at all. Camille Noûs is a fictional character created by the RogueESR group, which opposes the policy of excellence and the break-up of the French public research system in progress for about 15 years.

"The dazzling scores of Camille Noûs in the international rankings will quickly illustrate the absurdity of the indicators used to evaluate the research output," hope the creators of the character, Olivier Monod reported for the French newspaper Liberation recently.

Behind this almost schoolboy initiative, it is an opposition between two visions of the world that is played out: On the one hand, individual success, stratification and power, and on the other hand, the collective, with its sharing and independence.

The policy of this government is turned towards the concepts of “excellence” and recruitment of “stars,” the collective argues. d, judges the collective. By highlighting this meritocracy (or this Darwinism, to use the words of the president of the CNRS), the executive completely denies the incremental and collective nature of the research. This is precisely what Camille Noûs defends.

This “symbolic character,” whose name means both “we” and “reason” in Greek, is “intended to embody the collective character of research professions,” according to its creators.

Stéphane André, professor at the University of Lorraine, is one of the first to have put the name of Camille Noûs in co-author of one of his articles on the rheology of composite materials in the process of being accepted by a publisher.

"I saw it as an act of protest, a good way to demonstrate the fact that the way in which scientific publishing and scientific evaluation work is not in line with academic values," he explains to Liberation. The advent of based on the list of published articles pushes researchers to no longer want to advance knowledge but their own number of publications.”

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