It should be noted that Newton himself dealt out a fair bit of the academic bastardry, both to Hooke and Leibniz.

I dont see much of this conspiracy in Australian science from governments. Mostly it is in the disciplines that such things happen, and even there, Australia is one of the more liberal nations when it comes to respecting science. However, it may very well be happening in the areas of climatology and environmental science.

Interesting article... but where are the specific examples of contemporary scientists being muzzled? There wasn't one hard piece of evidence presented here that I could clearly make out.

There are real-life examples. I was at Adelaide Uni during the last decade of the 50-year struggle by the scientific establishment to prevent Wegener's continental drift hypothesis from replacing the then-dominant paradigm of Hutton/Lyell uniformitarianism. If we students had admitted we believed in drifting continents, we would have been failed. The Sun-climate connection is the same. The Royal Society has been calling supporting correlations mere coincidence since 1892 - and is as vigorously anti-Sun now as ever. Try and get research funding to show that our ever-changing climate is solar-driven, not people-driven. Alternatively, send a paper to Nature saying that the next Little Ice Age cold period will be fully developed by 2030. Good luck!

Sparky Here is something of interest.

Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, on those who would shout down climate change dissenters:

Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220

This is still in the US and Europe. Where's the evidence that it is happening in Australia?

The problem starts with end-product, which has progressively devalued itself in the eyes of the general public over the years.

The writer is suggesting that large amounts of valid research is somehow suppressed, and that judgements made by "faceless, unaccountable people" prevent our seeing important research results.

But should all research, including the shoddiest, be published? Should there not be some form of quality control?

I suspect that the public is sufficiently sceptical about such reports for it to make little difference if we were suddenly flooded with all the suppressed information. Scarcely a week goes by without some scientists somewhere contradicting the findings of another set of scientists on the properties of a particular foodstuff. One laboratory swears blind that the earth will succumb to insufferably high temperatures in a matter of years, while the next one warns us of the approaching ice age.

We quite naturally approach every new “finding” with increasing doubt as to its connection with reality; having to cope with increased volumes of equally contentious conclusions from impossibly abstruse evidence is unlikely to improve our overall level of understanding.

Industry is littered with corruption in this area. Large companies frequently pay well-known research organizations to conduct a study that comes to conclusions that it likes. It is simply not possible for ordinary citizens to distinguish between such “paided” reports, and a disinterested analysis.

>>we have certainly entered a period in our history when more new knowledge is less accessible to more people than ever before <<

This, in the age of the Internet, I find absolutely impossible to accept.

It might be more credible so suggest that “we have entered a period in our history where more new knowledge is more accessible to more people than ever before, but we are less capable of assessing and absorbing it, simply by virtue of its sheer volume.”