One of the efforts to increase the country's industrial competitiveness is to provide an environment where companies and society can easily access the latest technologies and innovations. However, the surrounding environment does not seem to be very good. The ranking of world universities is repeated every year. Since elementary school, we have been taught to work hard to get a good ranking, and so for us, who can't be satisfied with anything until it is represented as a rank, announcement of university rankings are something we all very much look forward to.
 
Through internationally rankings such as QS Ranking or USWORLD NEWS and by the diligent ranking of schools in Korea that are kindly announced every year, a university's management team can objectively grasp their position amongst others, and based on this, they are given an opportunity to reflect on themselves as well as receive praise. Since this ranking system is directly related to the students' grades that are required for their admission, it is natural for schools to not be concerned about it. 

SCI papers and indicators that improve their ripple effects are widely used as important indicators for ranking in university evaluation, and this SCI paper is based on one of the key indicators for evaluating tasks in various national R&D projects. Therefore, most universities and research institutes hire professors and researchers by grading and scoring based on the SCI paper. Of course, after graduate school, students have to write lots of SCI papers to end up where they want to go the most. Due to the continuous inflation of the number of papers, it seems that one needs 4-5 times more papers than when I was first appointed as a professor in order to settle in a decent place. In addition, looking at the number of citations, now one has to write papers that many foreigners view and cite. Thus, it not only me but all scientific and engineering researchers that are working hard on writing SCI papers. We work hard and write SCI papers for the rankings of universities, research institutes, and our country.
 
SCI papers that are written in such ways are distributed through large overseas platforms and through the database, the paper publishing platform collects huge amounts of money. In extreme cases, the amount of money required to publish a thesis can take up to 3 to 4 million won. Rumor has it that the subscription fee that is asked of a single university seems to be over 1 billion won a year. It is a system where we pay to publish, and then we have to pay again to purchase and read it. However, if one does not have access to this platform, it is quite difficult to obtain a research papers.
 
I don't know about the policies of large corporations, but it is hard for many national and public research institutes and small universities to easily access all platforms. The problem may not only be in these universities and research institutes, but also in the fact that real new technological discoveries and innovative solutions are not being able to be quickly used in industries and policies. Regarding the technological development of SMEs, Korea's R&D results are not being easily used.
 
It is not only because they do not have the time to read papers in English, but also that they cannot afford to subscribe to such expensive platforms. Most of the scientific and technological achievements made using people's taxes have been uploaded to foreign platforms, so it has become a situation where the Korean industry is not even aware of such achievements. Is it not true that it was rather in the past, when SCI papers were not written, that many good technical achievements written in Korean were accessible as research papers within Korea?
 
The reason for the gap between the actual field and academics can be attributed to the excuse of the evaluation of universities that are excessively rank-based and the SCI-centered evaluation of research results. At least in the field of engineering, it is hoped that a policy and social atmosphere will be created so that along with efforts to maintain international reputation, technologies that can be quickly used in domestic industries can be easily accessed. SCI stands for “Small Companies are Inaccessible”. It is time to reflect on whether the excessive worship of SCI is hindering the linkage between nation's scientific technology and industry.