"Especially if you are already well-established. Publish less, but publish better research. Put time and effort into transparency. Share everything you can share, as openly as you can share it. Use your privileged position to do research in the way you think it ought to be done, even if that’s not the quickest way to achieve academic success. (...) Be aware of the implicit signal you might be giving those you supervise when you say things like ‘you need to get a result’ or ‘we need to make this publishable’."

While I agree in the abstract, the problem is that when you're well-established, in most areas, your research basically amounts to supervising PhD students and postdocs who are not well-established. And they're struggling to meet the requirements to finish their thesis, get a permanent position, etc. So if you encourage them to do slow science and publish less, there's a high risk that you're basically letting them down. Plus, to do research you're probably using some grant funding and guess what the funding agency expects...

Thus, most people never get to a point in their career where they can safely say "let's ignore incentives and just pursue this project slowly and carefully". There might be some exceptions. Probably in math, where research is often individual. And maybe in other areas if you can have a smallish side project with other professors that doesn't require much specific funding, or if you have a student who is finishing and has already secured a position in industry so their stakes aren't high. I've been in those situations sometimes, but it's the exception rather than the rule. The truth is that even senior professors seldom have the luxury of not being heavily pressured by incentives.

I think this is exactly the hard part: individual virtue alone does not solve a system where supervisors, trainees, and funders are all pulled by the same incentives. "Do slower, better science" is not actionable unless the surrounding infrastructure and rewards change too. That is a big part of what we're thinking about with Liberata, especially around peer review and attribution. If relevant, our beta waitlist is open: https://liberata.info/beta-signup

Once they're established, they can decide how many PhD students to take on. And a lot of foreign students who come on J-1 visas and are sponsored by their governments are not under that pressure. A lot of them will get a position in their home country with a lot less publishing pressure than in the US.

The professor can always set his terms, and it's up to a student to have him as an advisor. In both universities I attended, there were professors who were very fussy about how much research they did and how much money they brought in (could be 0), and if a student wanted them as an advisor, they needed to understand the risks involved.

Plus more generally, contact with peers through publishing is good. It is easy to end up with work that does not really advance the state of the art if you’re not making regular trips to convince others that your work is interesting.