Editorials

In 2004, I assumed an administrative role in my university, thus joining what is commonly referred to as the “Dark Side” of academia. I have only just returned to my position as a faculty member. Some pursue administration as a career path and expect to move up the academic ladder, progressing from department head, to dean, to provost, and, perhaps, even to president. Others, like myself, view administration as an intriguing experiment: I certainly didn’t anticipate staying away from a faculty role for so long (almost 13 years). Like many faculty, I had little experience with organizational leadership when I joined the Dark Side. I was like a Padawan apprentice (another reference from Star Wars) aspiring to be a Jedi and greatly in need of master Yoda’s training.

An article on the “sleeping beauties” in science (Ke et al. 2015) recently appeared on my desk (or more accurately, on my desktop). “Sleeping beauties” in science have been defined by van Raan (2004) to be publications that go unnoticed for a long time and then suddenly attract a great deal of attention. The “sleeping beauty” concept prompted me to review whether their existence is a component of our current publication practices. Do we have the incentive to develop risky ideas or the time to put together significant, paradigm-shifting papers?

I am sure that many of us remember “mineralogy” from our student days as beginning with the orthosilicate group, passing quickly through sorosilicates to beryl, then through pyroxenes and amphiboles, and on to micas, feldspars, and the silica minerals. Amphiboles were studied to exhaustion, their nomenclature (now mostly discarded) being then regarded as of prime importance. Sulfides, on the other hand, were almost completely ignored, despite their economic importance and significance, as we now know, as agents of climate cooling. In petrography classes, sulfides were classified together with oxides as “opaques” and dismissed from further consideration.