I think there is another aspect that makes determining scientific value difficult.<p>In the hard sciences there are a lot of esoteric sub-disciplines that do rigorous work that seems to be of little consequence. I would suggest that one of the costs of maintaining a technological society is maintaining practitioners in many of these sub-disciplines just to keep the thread of knowledge alive.<p>If it was all left to the private sector, such researchers would be out of a job as soon as they were not longer necessary to the tasks at hand.<p>So many times in my own research have I needed a particular bit of information, and I search the literature and I find that someone did collect the data 30 years ago, presented in a paper with 5 citations. It would not be tractable for me to collect that data myself.<p>The problems with current management of scientific productivity is that the management ideas employed are good for running a production line cranking out a B-24 Liberator per hour, which is not really the same thing.