Tag: Research management

How institutions can tap into research managers’ potential

[ad_1]

Part of a research manager’s remit is to act as a liaison between researchers and funding agencies, companies and governments.Credit: SetsukoN/Getty

The global research ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex, meaning that institutions with strong research management and administration teams could have an advantage in undertaking multidisciplinary and cross-border projects. To attract the next generation of research management and administration professionals and to support their growth, institutions need to provide them with a clear career trajectory, proposes a book published in November.

The Emerald Handbook of Research Management and Administration Around the World brings together the perspectives of research managers and administrators (RMAs) and highlights the field’s biggest developments and most urgent needs. The book was edited by Simon Kerridge, an honorary member of staff in research and innovation services at the University of Kent, UK; Susi Poli, who studies higher-education staff development at the University of Bologna, Italy; and Mariko Yang-Yoshihara, an instructor and education researcher at Stanford University in California.

Nature Index spoke to Kerridge, Poli and Yang-Yoshihara about the most important insights they gained from compiling the book.

What prompted you to produce the book?

In the past few decades, scholars and practitioners have noted the rise of RMAs, who play a crucial part in scientific ecosystems worldwide. However, few initiatives have investigated RMAs in a cross-regional manner and have aimed to understand their role in a broader context.

The three of us met at a conference in early 2020 and decided to write a paper together. But then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Regular Zoom meetings kept us engaged and prompted a constant flow of ideas. Our plans evolved and expanded. Eventually, one of us said, “Why don’t we write a book?” The suggestion seemed a bit audacious at first, but we have something in common: optimism. This is how a simple idea to combine three people’s research evolved into a three-year project that involved authors from around the world.

What are the largest challenges for RMAs globally, based on your findings?

The biggest hurdle is the absence of a well-defined and structured career path. A consistent theme emerges in the book: although RMAs are gaining global recognition, particularly in regions such as North America, Western Europe, Asia and Australasia, many countries are still developing a clear occupational trajectory for those entering the field. Individuals in research administration in South America, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and Africa, frequently feel undervalued.

This book was born out of a desire to change the narrative. Despite having diverse doctoral and career backgrounds, we all recognized that during our graduate studies, the focus was on how to become academics, not professionals, such as RMAs. We aim to shift this perspective and show the next generation that becoming an RMA could be a viable and rewarding career path, and that they could help to advance science and knowledge as much as academics do. Currently, few university students or young professionals see research management and administration as an occupation.

In the final chapter (chapter 6), we emphasize that policymakers and institutional leaders need to be proactive in raising awareness of RMAs’ importance in global research collaborations and in encouraging top talent to pursue careers in the field.

How did you achieve such a broad investigation of RMAs?

The book is structured into two main sections. The first part aims to foster best practice in the field and provide resources for future generations of RMAs. The second compiles country- and region-specific information, and aims to capture the current state of the field globally. We brought on board regional editors who helped to identify and communicate with individual authors, who could contribute country-specific observations. We also used associations that were members of the International Network of Research Management Societies to help find contributors in regions beyond the reach of our personal networks.

Four global-south researchers making cross-border collaborations count

Most previous studies on RMAs were written mainly by authors in North American and European countries, leading to a skewed contribution by these regions. We made concerted efforts to broaden our reach to regions in which research on RMAs had not previously been documented; at least, not in the English language. In the end, 127 authors from 50 regions and countries contributed their expertise.

We acknowledge that, despite its unprecedented scope, the book could not include some countries and regions. In some cases, this was because people we approached did not respond our calls, or because of language barriers, political situations or limitations in our network. Furthermore, widespread recognition of RMAs in research ecosystems in certain countries might also be lacking. We think that identifying regions in which the profession lags behind could enable further understanding of RMAs’ roles in projects.

What key differences did you identify in the roles of RMAs from various regions and countries?

One distinction highlighted by several authors is the gender profile (see, for example, chapter 5.44). In most countries, around 80% of RMAs identify as women. However, in certain regions (including Africa) and countries (such as Colombia and Japan), the gender distribution seems to be more balanced. This could be because this profession is relatively new in these places, meaning that more individuals enter the field from researcher roles rather than by transitioning from other professional routes.

What kinds of initiative are most effective in advancing the reputation, function and integration of RMAs in the wider research community?

One of the key findings of the book is the growing importance of professional associations in shaping and advancing the profession.

RMAs can join numerous national and regional associations, such as the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators, the Australasian Research Management Society, the Southern African Research and Innovation Management Association and the West African Research and Innovation Management Association. National organizations with an international reach, such as the US National Council of University Research Administrators and the US Society of Research Administrators International, provide RMAs with a sense of belonging beyond national boundaries and increase the legitimacy of the profession and the mobility of those working in the field.

The book also notes the emerging trend of professionalization in regions such as Africa and Asia, and there are early signs of similar associations being set up in Central and Eastern European countries and the Caribbean.

What are the most valuable but unrecognized skills of RMAs?

Many chapters in the first part highlight the importance of ‘soft’ skills, such as effective communication, the building of collaborations, inclusive leadership and cross-cultural understanding. It is essential for RMAs to establish robust relationships and partnerships with key stakeholders such as researchers, funders, institutional leaders and policymakers. There is much discussion globally about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for taking over certain administrative roles, but skills such as the ability to navigate intricate situations with tenacity, being adaptable and having a considerable amount of empathy are often overlooked and unrecognized. We think that these skills can’t easily be replaced by AI.

Academic researchers bring expertise, yet, just as a skilled racing driver still needs a team of engineers to anticipate problems and offer support, RMAs also have an indispensable role in the effective administration of research projects.

We hope that readers use this book as a platform for discussions that shape the future of RMAs and that they will seize opportunities in this evolving field.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 26, 2024
Why it would be a dangerous folly to end US–China science pact

[ad_1]

China and the United States cooperated to ensure that miniature neutron source reactors can run on low-enriched uranium.Credit: Xinhua/Cai Yang/Alamy

Two things can be said of the continuing delay to renewing the US–China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement. The good news is that the two sides are still talking about continuing with the landmark 45-year-old agreement, which has yielded historic levels of research collaboration and student exchanges between the two countries. The bad news is that one or both sides could still walk away. This would be catastrophic. Wisdom and forward thinking must prevail.

Before China and the United States established diplomatic relations on 1 January 1979, there was little or no formal relationship between the two nations, and high levels of mistrust. Science cooperation was identified as offering a relatively swift way to break the ice and begin establishing people-to-people contacts. Then-US president Jimmy Carter and China’s premier at the time, Deng Xiaoping, signed the science agreement before the month was out, on 31 January.

US and China likely to delay renewal of key science pact again

Admittedly, the two countries’ motivations for pursuing scientific cooperation were different. For China, the decision was development-led. The nation was far from the research-driven power that it is now. Today, it boasts some 3,000 higher-education institutions; back then, its annual per-capita income stood at less than US$200. China’s leaders wanted to learn how to build a world-class higher education system, as well as how they might use research to boost economic growth, and, by extension, living standards, as Julian Gewirtz, a historian of China–US economic-research ties, writes in Unlikely Partners (2017). The United States also had a political goal: to steer China away from the orbit of the Soviet Union during the ongoing cold war.

Today, although the two countries can hardly be described as ‘best friends forever’, the fruits of their collaboration are clear. Some 3 million Chinese students have studied at universities in the United States since the agreement was brokered. In 2021, US universities awarded more than 8,000 doctorates to students from China, out of a total of around 25,000 international doctorates. Each country is the other’s biggest research partner, by a considerable margin.

Relations took a negative turn during Donald Trump’s US presidency, from 2017 to 2021. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, rhetoric harshened significantly, and this was followed by an erosion of trade and diplomatic links. In the realms of research and higher education, a narrative took hold that there is something inherently suspicious about cooperation between US and Chinese researchers — with an emphasis on known threats such as spying and intellectual-property theft. This has clearly affected collaborations, but has also had a broader reach. There has been surveillance of some innocent researchers. And Florida’s decision to stop universities hiring researchers from China (as well as from Iran and a handful of other countries) would not have seemed out of place during the cold war.

The United States has not been alone in initiating decoupling efforts. From March 2020, China’s government adopted a policy whereby its researchers would no longer be encouraged to publish in international journals. China’s leadership has also taken to talking more and more about self-reliance, one implication of which is less and less need for collaborative effort.

Mutual benefits

John Holdren, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was science adviser to former US president Barack Obama and, in 2011, he and Wan Gang, China’s then minister of science and technology, renewed the US–China science pact. That agreement was designed to ensure that the benefits would be mutual, Holdren tells Nature. Those benefits are both national and global.

Collaboration between the two countries on environmental protection includes projects to monitor and improve air and water quality, as well as watershed protection, and projects to reduce electronic waste — benefiting both countries in different ways. The US Environmental Protection Agency has called its relationship with China “one of its most significant”.

In 2011, China’s then science minister Wan Gang and then US science adviser John Holdren renewed the science pact originally agreed between former Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping and former US president Jimmy Carter (depicted in black and white photograph).Credit: Nature and Science/Alamy

When it comes to global challenges, researchers in China, the United States and Europe are cooperating extensively on studying the role of nature in human prosperity¹^,². This evolving body of work is foundational to ongoing efforts to incorporate nature into how economies are valued.

Another notable but little-known project aims to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation. Since 2009, China and the United States have been working together to convert a type of nuclear research reactor called a miniature neutron source reactor so that instead of using highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium as fuel, it runs on low-enriched uranium — which cannot be used in nuclear weapons. China has supplied this type of reactor to a number of countries, including Iran, Nigeria and Pakistan. In a small way, this cooperation has contributed to a safer world.

‘This is exclusion’: Florida law restricts hiring of researchers from seven countries

And then there’s climate change. After a period of silence that began in 2022, the two countries began talking again last year, thanks in no small measure to the long-standing relationship between their then climate envoys, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua. Last year, California made an agreement with China pledging to cut carbon emissions and transition away from using fossil fuels. Both Kerry and Zhenhua are moving on to new roles, and the legacy of their diplomatic efforts risks being undermined if scientists in the two nations cannot maintain their research ties.

Germany’s handling of its research relations with China could offer lessons. Last month, the German Academic Exchange Service published some sensible recommendations that balance the risks of such collaborations with the benefits.

The document acknowledges the benefits that have come from closer ties, while advocating what it calls a “realpolitik approach” to future links — one based on practical objectives, rather than ideology. Ultimately, it says that universities should be the ones to decide what is mutually beneficial in this regard, while taking the necessary precautions to protect against possible harm.

Risk management

There are, of course, always risks when researchers from different political systems collaborate. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that big powers spy on each other, says Holdren. But, as with most applications of science in public affairs, from nanotechnology to nuclear energy, the answer to handling risks is to assess them, manage them and mitigate them — always using rigorously tested scientific knowledge.

After 45 years of scientific cooperation, the United States and China risk veering off course. It would be a dangerous folly to bring an end to research cooperation that has such potential to help meet the many challenges faced by China, the United States and the world. In 1979, scientists broke the ice at a time of great tension. As tensions rise once again, researchers could be the foot in the door that keeps communications open.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 26, 2024
Florida law restricts hiring of researchers from seven countries

[ad_1]

Families protest against the passage of Florida law SB 846, which restricts state universities from hiring researchers from China and six other countries.Credit: Erich Martin/ACLU

Public institutions in Florida are struggling to adapt after a state law quashed the recruitment of graduate students, postdocs and staff members from China, Russia, Iran and other countries labelled as of concern. The law, passed unanimously by the state’s legislature in May 2023 as a way of addressing foreign interference in academia, has prompted fierce backlash from university faculty members. They say that it will affect hundreds of early-career researchers and that it risks driving talent away from the state.

“This is exclusion. This is discrimination,” says Zhengfei Guan, a food and resource economist at the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville. “It’s not just about dealing with interference from certain governments, it’s prohibiting individuals from coming to America. There are no other words for that.”

The Florida law, called SB 846, bars the state’s 12 public universities from taking money from or forming “partnerships” with entities in a “country of concern”, named as China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Although it doesn’t affect undergraduate admissions or individuals already living in the United States, the law places restrictions on collaborations with colleagues in these countries and on the hiring of graduate students, postdocs and research staff from abroad. Guan says that candidates from China and Iran in particular make up a big proportion of the UF applicant pool. Currently, several hundred UF graduate students and postdocs hail from the seven countries.

Why it would be a dangerous folly to end US–China science pact

SB 846 follows on the heels of other US legislation and policies aimed at curbing foreign influence in research and industry. The China Initiative, launched in 2018, sought to prosecute researchers with undisclosed ties to the Chinese Communist Party, but netted very few arrests and was discontinued in 2022 after allegations that it spread anti-Asian attitudes.

In Florida, universities are required to review the proposed employment of any researcher with foreign ties — even US citizens who are living abroad or who have previously received training or been employed outside the country. Candidates who fail this ‘risk-based’ assessment must then have their identity passed to a law-enforcement agency dictated by the governor. The same law also mandates that universities monitor employment-related travel to foreign countries for professional activities such as conferences.

Rory Truex, an international-affairs researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey, says that blanket policies such as these have typically been ineffectual at clamping down on intellectual theft, because so much US research is openly shared. Instead, Truex says that SB 846 and its predecessors reflect a growing paranoia about foreign espionage that has damaged the country’s academic competitiveness by alienating talented early-career researchers. “Chinese universities are basically all public institutions, and anything public in China also means a high degree of control by the Chinese Communist Party,” he says. “But that interconnectedness does not mean that faculty and students [from those universities] cannot be trusted.”

Early days

SB 846 went into effect last July, just before the beginning of the academic-year hiring cycle. Already, some researchers have reported disruptions. Guan planned to extend an offer to a postdoc from China in August, but had to seek approval from UF. The institution, in turn, reached out to the state’s board of governors, which oversees all Florida public universities. At first, Guan says, he was told that the process would take weeks, but as it stretched into months, he had to defer the postdoc’s start date to October, then November. By December, the applicant said that they were aware of the law and had accepted a position in another state.

“I was desperate to get this brilliant young man into the research programme, and I was telling the university that it would be a blessing for us,” Guan says. “This law is creating a very hostile environment — it’s treating students and faculty from these countries like criminals — and this will have a very negative effect on the academic environment in this country.”

Why the US border remains ‘a place of terror’ for Chinese researchers

Scientists are also concerned about their federal research grants, many of which ban discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or nation of origin. A US National Science Foundation (NSF) spokesperson says that the agency cannot comment on whether it has entered into any conversations with the state university system or the board of governors. However, the NSF expects all awardee organizations to adhere to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including for “NSF-funded awards and the admission process for educational and research programs within awardee organizations”. Compliance reviews are carried out by the NSF in response to complaints, but the agency did not respond to questions about whether any such complaints had yet been raised.

Not everyone is feeling pinched by the news. At UF’s College of Medicine, also in Gainesville, only US citizens or permanent residents can be admitted to the MD programme. International PhD students can be admitted as students, but not paid as employees from a grant. This means that hiring practices haven’t changed much for UF cancer-cell biologist Daiqing Liao. He hired a research assistant from China without issue just before the law went into effect; he says the assistant plans to apply to a PhD programme at the university but might face hurdles. If hiring becomes more challenging, Liao will probably shift to hiring staff from other countries, particularly India. “So far, though, I haven’t noticed very much, and so it’s hard to know how this will impact my lab long-term,” he says.

How universities are adapting

Last December, members of the UF Florida Chinese Faculty Association launched a petition urging “the timely development of clear guidance regarding the hiring procedures”, and asking UF president Ben Sasse to support open hiring practices. As of late January, more than 370 faculty members have signed it, noting that “failure to act swiftly may result in the loss of exceptional students to other universities”.

Both Guan and Liao say that they have yet to receive clear guidance from UF on how the law will be implemented. Christina Ciocca Eller, a sociologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who previously co-chaired a committee on research security for the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that administrators are probably struggling to adapt. “Universities are very torn in their responsibilities — they don’t want to break laws, but at the same time, they have responsibilities to their [researchers] to give them the capacity to pursue the scientific enterprise,” she says. “At the very least, the responsibility is to make clear what the policy is.”

Stacey Patterson, vice-president for research at Florida State University in Tallahassee, says that the school has established a foreign-influence task force to lead its implementation process, and is working on a set of frequently asked questions about the regulation. It is also formulating a process for seeking pre-approval from the board of governors, which can grant exceptions to the law.

Academics fight moves to defund diversity programmes at US universities

Steve Orlando, associate vice-president for communications at UF, says that his university will not be establishing an analogous group to assess the legislation, and is instead adopting the eight-step approval process laid out by the board of governors. A flowchart of the process, which Orlando says was “communicated clearly to deans and centre directors”, outlines how researchers will need to consult with their university’s general counsel and receive approval from their institution’s board of trustees before bringing a petition before the state board. The state board did not respond to questions about whether its members have yet considered a request.

According to Ciocca Eller, this case-by-case assessment of petitions will place an enormous strain on time and resources, requiring new offices to process requests and creating hiring log-jams. “It’s going to be really hard for these institutions to prioritize this, which will lead to more backlog of academics [not] being able to pursue their research because they’re waiting for a directive from the board.”

Already, Florida is experiencing a brain drain as researchers move to states with less-restrictive policies — a trend felt especially keenly among Chinese and Chinese American scientists. A 2023 survey¹ of more than 1,300 tenured or tenure-track scientists of Chinese descent at US universities revealed widespread feelings of fear and anxiety regarding their future in the United States.

“Many are saying that we’re simply better off voting with our feet” and moving elsewhere, Guan says. “I have the same sentiment, but there’s still injustice here, so I’ve decided to stay and fight.”

[ad_2]

Source link

February 26, 2024
China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct

[ad_1]

The reputation of Chinese science has been “adversely affected” by the number of retractions in recent years, according to a government notice.Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty

Chinese universities are days away from the deadline to complete a nationwide audit of retracted research papers and probe of research misconduct. By 15 February, universities must submit to the government a comprehensive list of all academic articles retracted from English- and Chinese-language journals in the past three years. They need to clarify why the papers were retracted and investigate cases involving misconduct, according to a 20 November notice from the Ministry of Education’s Department of Science, Technology and Informatization.

The government launched the nationwide self-review in response to Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, retracting a large number of papers by Chinese authors. These retractions, along with those from other publishers, “have adversely affected our country’s academic reputation and academic environment”, the notice states.

A Nature analysis shows that last year, Hindawi issued more than 9,600 retractions, of which the vast majority — about 8,200 — had a co-author in China. Nearly 14,000 retraction notices, of which some three-quarters involved a Chinese co-author, were issued by all publishers in 2023.

This is “the first time we’ve seen such a national operation on retraction investigations”, says Xiaotian Chen, a library and information scientist at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, who has studied retractions and research misconduct in China. Previous investigations have largely been carried out on a case-by-case basis — but this time, all institutions have to conduct their investigations simultaneously, says Chen.

Tight deadline

The ministry’s notice set off a chain of alerts, cascading to individual university departments. Bulletins posted on university websites required researchers to submit their retractions by a range of dates, mostly in January — leaving time for universities to collate and present the data.

Although the alerts included lists of retractions that the ministry or the universities were aware of, they also called for unlisted retractions to be added.

More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record

According to Nature’s analysis, which includes only English-language journals, more than 17,000 retraction notices for papers published by Chinese co-authors have been issued since 1 January 2021, which is the start of the period of review specified in the notice. The analysis, an update of one conducted in December, used the Retraction Watch database, augmented with retraction notices collated from the Dimensions database, and involved assistance from Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France. It is unclear whether the official lists contain the same number of retracted papers.

Regardless, the timing to submit the information will be tight, says Shu Fei, a bibliometrics scientist at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China. The ministry gave universities less than three months to complete their self-review — and this was cut shorter by the academic winter break, which typically starts in mid-January and concludes after the Chinese New Year, which fell this year on 10 February.

“The timing is not good,” he says. Shu expects that universities are most likely to submit only a preliminary report of their researchers’ retracted papers included on the official lists.

But Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China, says that because the ministry has set a deadline, universities will work hard to submit their findings on time.

Researchers with retracted papers will have to explain whether the retraction was owing to misconduct, such as image manipulation, or an honest mistake, such as authors identifying errors in their own work, says Chen: “In other words, they may have to defend themselves.” Universities then must investigate and penalize misconduct. If a researcher fails to declare their retracted paper and it is later uncovered, they will be punished, according to the ministry notice. The cost of not reporting is high, says Chen. “This is a very serious measure.”

It is not known what form punishment might take, but in 2021, China’s National Health Commission posted the results of its investigations into a batch of retracted papers. Punishments included salary cuts, withdrawal of bonuses, demotions and timed suspensions from applying for research grants and rewards.

The notice explicitly states that the first corresponding author of a paper is responsible for submitting the response. This requirement will largely address the problem of researchers shirking responsibility for collaborative work, says Li Tang, a science- and innovation-policy researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. The notice also emphasizes due process, says Tang. Researchers alleged to have committed misconduct have a right to appeal during the investigation.

The notice is a good approach for addressing misconduct, says Wang. Previous efforts by the Chinese government have stopped at issuing new research-integrity guidelines that were poorly implemented, she says. And when government bodies did launch self-investigations of published literature, they were narrower in scope and lacked clear objectives. This time, the target is clear — retractions — and the scope is broad, involving the entire university research community, she says.

“Cultivating research integrity takes time, but China is on the right track,” says Tang.

What next

It is not clear what the ministry will do with the flurry of submissions. Wang says that, because the retraction notices are already freely available, publicizing the collated lists and underlying reasons for retraction could be useful. She hopes that a similar review will be conducted every year “to put more pressure” on authors and universities to monitor research integrity.

What happens next will reveal how seriously the ministry regards research misconduct, says Shu. He suggests that, if the ministry does not take further action after Chinese New Year, the notice could be an attempt to respond to the reputational damage caused by the mass retractions last year.

The ministry did not respond to Nature’s questions about the misconduct investigation.

Chen says regardless of what the ministry does with the information, the reporting process itself will help to curb misconduct because it is “embarrassing to the people in the report”.

But it might primarily affect researchers publishing in English-language journals. Retraction notices in Chinese-language journals are rare.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 12, 2024
Could roving researchers help address the challenge of taking parental leave?

[ad_1]

As a roving researcher Alice Francis covers the work of scientists taking a long-term absence from the lab.Credit: Alice Francis

Biochemist Gemma Fisher worried that she would leave a long list of experiments unattended during her maternity leave, but as she welcomed twin daughters into the world last May, her laboratory bench was as busy as ever. Fisher had been awarded six months of part-time support, thanks to a programme launched in September 2022 by her employer, the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) at Imperial College London. The support was provided by Alice Francis, a molecular biologist employed by the LMS as a ‘roving researcher’. Francis has spent much of her time in the post covering four postdoctoral researchers — all women on maternity leave.

“During my virtual meetings with Gemma, I joke that the twins will now help make sense of our data,” says Francis, who concluded her six-month assignment in December but continues to offer some support to Fisher’s projects.

Women in science

“Having Alice on board as a roving researcher has made me feel less guilty for taking leave, and allowed me to recover more quickly from my first pregnancy,” says Fisher, who plans to take 11 months of leave but stay up to date with her projects by taking ‘keeping in touch’ days. These optional working days allow parents to work a limited number of hours for normal pay, without affecting their entitlement to the full amount of leave. Fisher uses them to stay in touch with Francis and other colleagues at the DNA Motors research group and to analyse data at home.

Rover trials

Motivated by institutional equity goals, roving-researcher-style programmes are set to launch in early 2024 at the University of Cambridge, UK, the Barcelona-based August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) in Spain, and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam. These trial programmes are based on success stories at the LMS over the past year and at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, over the past four years, where ‘rovers’ have been making the option of long-term leave more viable for scientists. Although sick leave and absences for caregivers are also covered, the demand for support during parental leave is motivating administrators to better explore the needs of a diversifying workforce. Meanwhile, the first roving researchers are juggling the challenges of a fast-paced role that requires unprecedented adaptability.

Gemma Fisher while on parental leave with her twin daughters and husband.Credit: Gemma Fisher

“Right now I really enjoy the bench work, but I don’t know if I will want to start a new project every six months for the rest of my life,” says Francis, who has strayed far from the focus of her postdoctoral research at the University of Western Australia in Perth, where she studied calcium channels in the heart. Francis now rotates between assignments that require RNA library preparation for genomic sequencing, drug screening with human cell lines and colony genotyping with mouse models. To support Fisher, she spent two weeks in an intensive handover training session focused on biochemistry methods such as protein purification and assays to measure the activity of cell membrane transporters. “My ability to manage an experiment is getting stronger,” says Fisher, “but there is a risk that I will just end up as a point of call.”

Few other positions require a researcher to perform such a wide range of technical procedures, and rovers say that this opens and closes doors. Unlike postdoctoral fellows and staff scientists, who spend years working with the same group and train for months before taking ownership of a project, a roving researcher has little time to develop their own research. They might co-author papers if they contribute data, but owing to the short rotation schedule, rovers are unlikely to earn the first-author credentials that make a candidate competitive in the faculty job market.

A door back in

Yet roving researcher Melanie Stammers says that the role opens doors in industry by offering the rare opportunity to diversify training and compare methods as they change between groups. Stammers was the first rover at the Babraham Institute, which introduced its trial programme in 2020. By training as a rover in RNA-sequencing library building, a protein–RNA interaction mapping technique called iCLIP and flow cytometry, Stammers re-entered science after taking a 17-year career break to raise children, now 24, 23 and 19 years old. Techniques changed quickly after she left her postdoctoral research position at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK, because of an ongoing lack of affordable childcare in the area. She returned to science as a part-time volunteer in the Babraham immunology programme before moving to a funded position in the institute’s biological chemistry facility. While she was there she had two papers published¹^,². But these opportunities allowed her to demonstrate only a narrow set of skills to potential employers.

Melanie Stammers (left) was the first recruit to the roving-researcher programme, founded in 2020 by Cheryl Smythe (right) then at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK.Credit: Peter Humphreys

“I decided to move on to the roving-researcher role to learn a wider variety of techniques in the hope that this would make me more employable,” says Stammers, who is now a senior scientist at the Cambridge base of the biotechnology company Altos Labs. Roving also offered Stammers the opportunity to compare protocols between labs, something that few researchers get to do. The experience of seeing the different ways in which experiments were recorded and samples were stored led to Stammers being appointed to the Babraham’s Research Integrity Steering Group to contribute to best practices for experimental design.

“Not all scientists want to become group leaders, and the roving-researcher position is ideal for those who want to work in industry. There are few other roles that offer the rare perspective of methods and lab culture as they change between groups” says Cheryl Smythe at Altos Labs. Smythe is the former head of strategic research development at the Babraham Institute and founder of the roving programme.

Long-term support

Expectant parents are likely to be those who benefit the most from skilled rovers such as Stammers and Francis, if growth trends continue. Many institutions predict that the number of longer-term absences will increase as female scientists continue to make headway in the bioscience fields and more male scientists take advantage of paternity-leave benefits. In 2021 and 2022, 19 of the 21 long-term absences taken by IDIBAPS postdoctoral researchers, junior scientists and faculty members were due to parental leave — the other two were due to sick leave. Private donations made to support institutional research are allowing the IDIBAPS to employ its first roving researcher in March or April. “We are supporting all who need to take long-term leave, including sick leave,” says scientific coordinator Gemma Llaverias. “But as the programme is funded in part to meet the goals of our gender equity plan, maternity leave is our first priority.”

IDIBAPS director of strategy, Michela Bertero, waited to start a family until she was established in her profession and says that the roving programme will give women more choices. “Having children later in life also has challenges, and it is critical that we offer research support during maternity leave to faculty of every age group and career stage.” Postdoctoral researchers and junior researchers will also be eligible for support.

The University of Cambridge will also welcome its first roving researcher in March. Scientists who need to take a long-term absence for a range of reasons are eligible for coverage, yet “the first round of applications are all for women due to go on maternity leave”, says Laura Itzhaki, head of pharmacology and a member of the Cambridge roving-researcher committee. The committee says it’s also prepared to consider emergency requests and currently hopes to assist one male member of staff who submitted an application out-of-round for support with a case that does not relate to childcare. PhD students, research assistants, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members are eligible for support from a rover.

In October 2023, the NKI approved a similar pilot programme that allows only postdoctoral researchers on maternity leave to apply for coverage from a support scientist. Recruitment for the rover role began in January. The scheme focuses on postdoctoral researchers because “they are in a critical stage of their career when they plan to have a child”, says NKI director of operations Henri van Luenen. Unlike permanent faculty members, postdoctoral contracts can be as short as four years and leave little time to recoup work lost during a parental-leave absence. Between 2020 and 2022, just under half of the 37 people at the NKI who had a baby were working as postdoctoral researchers. Only two group leaders had babies. The rest of the people who took maternity leave were PhD students and technicians, who are not prioritized for support.

A celebrated role

Research suggests that paid and longer maternity leave is associated with reduced postpartum-depression symptoms³. But there is also evidence that women who take longer leaves are less likely to be promoted⁴, receive a raise or hold future positions of leadership. Some institutional leaders claim that longer periods of maternity leave lessen institutional productivity. When employers hire temporary researchers to cover parental leave, training costs are high for specialized positions. In some cases, human-resources staff spend a long time searching for cover scientists who then have to leave shortly after they are trained. By contrast, a permanent cohort of rovers continues to develop skills over time and therefore cut costs, all while advancing the projects of parents on leave, argue advocates of the roving programmes.

Laura Itzhaki and Catherine Wilson are involved in the University of Cambridge’s roving-researcher programme.Credit: Paolo Juan

Based on the success of their trial programme, the LMS made Francis a permanent member of staff in January and committed to long-term support of the roving model. Although the programme welcomes applications from any researcher who needs to take time off, including those on sick leave, so far only women working as postdoctoral researchers have applied for support while on parental leave. Since 2018, 15 LMS staff members have taken maternity leave.

Collection: Resources for mid-career scientists

The Babraham Institute similarly upgraded its fixed-term roving position to a permanent role in late 2023. “It was great to build up trust with the researchers who I covered,” says Stammers, who completed around 20 assignments during her 2.5 years in the role to support parents on leave and cover vacancies in core facilities. In total, the Babraham’s roving programme has covered 23 researchers in the almost 4 years since it launched. Because most long absences taken at the institute are for maternity leave, it is early-career mothers who have applied for and received the most support, but one postdoctoral father has also received short-term paternity support.

If the demand for the support of rovers continues at Cambridge, faculty members will develop a cohort of rovers to offer more specialized cover to those in need of support during a long-term leave. “We hope that roving will become an alternative career path that will be as equally celebrated as the role of staff scientist or group leader,” says Catherine Wilson, group leader in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge, who co-founded the institute’s roving programme.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 7, 2024
Open science — embrace it before it’s too late

[ad_1]

Biodiversity science is benefiting from volunteer researchers (seen here working at Chicago’s Fields Museum).Credit: Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty

The ‘open science’ concept is gaining more followers, not least through the efforts of the cultural organization UNESCO. Over the past several years, the organization has been consulting on how science can become more collaborative, transparent, accessible, equitable and inclusive, which are all attributes of open science. And in 2021, it published a framework for what a genuinely open science could look like.

At the end of last year, UNESCO, which is headquartered in Paris, published a report on the current status of this endeavour. The report makes it clear that, although there are instances of good practice, there is still much work to do to fulfil the potential of open science globally.

In 2021, UNESCO’s member states agreed on a definition of open science that includes open access to scientific knowledge (including the humanities and social sciences); open access to research infrastructure; open collaboration between scientists and ‘societal actors’ (essentially, all those who are not scientists); and open dialogue between different knowledge systems, including between scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledge.

The world’s goals to save humanity are hugely ambitious — but they are still the best option

Member states also pledged to incorporate the concept into their research systems, including using open-science principles in publicly funded research; supporting non-profit and community-driven publishing; encouraging the publication of research in more languages; and incentivizing the private sector to join discussions about achieving open-science goals.

UNESCO’s report describes several examples of positive initiatives, such as in research collaboration, open-access scientific publishing and public engagement in science. For example, in 2020, the Brazilian government launched the National Platform of Research Infrastructure, a digital platform in which scientific institutions can register their available infrastructure, and make it available to researchers outside their organization. This is an excellent way to spread access to expensive equipment across the research community.

Meanwhile, South African policymakers are consulting researchers to help to create a national open-science policy for the whole country. The aim here is to build more transparency, scrutiny and reproducibility into the country’s research system. The policy will also include measures to monitor progress.

The European Commission, based in Brussels, was an early proponent of open science. Between 2002 and 2020, it increased its funding for ‘societal engagement’ projects from €88 million to €462 million — an amount that is now equivalent to US$500 million. Moreover, a decade ago, all scientific publications arising from the European Union’s €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme needed to be published open-access. Citizen science is another growing area in open science with much promise, UNESCO notes. By 2018, half of all records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — an international open-access data repository based in Copenhagen — were from citizen scientists, up from around 10% in around 2007.

Other indicators are less rosy, however. Around three-quarters (73%) of publications in open-access repositories are in just six languages — with nearly half (46%) being in English alone. And in spite of some of the progress mentioned, overall the report finds that scientific institutions, such as universities, national science academies and journals, are struggling to include communities, in all their diversity, in the process of creating scientific knowledge itself.

Open science, done wrong, will compound inequities

Open science aligns with UNESCO’s founding mission for science and education to benefit all of humanity; and with the idea that access to science is a human right. But the organization’s interest in open science goes beyond these broad founding principles.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, are humanity’s best attempt to map a pathway towards a better future — and a more open approach to science could have a larger part to play in achieving them.

That effort needs as much help as it can get: only about 12% of the SDG targets are likely to be met by the 2030 deadline. Monitoring SDG indicators is one obvious way that citizen scientists can help. Some of the largest gaps in the collection of relevant SDG data are in low- and middle-income countries, which is where citizen research can really make a difference. In 2020, Dilek Fraisl, a data researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and her colleagues found that citizen-science projects were already helping to monitor at least five SDG indicators (D. Fraisl et al. Sustain. Sci. 15, 1735–1751; 2020). At the time, more than half of the data collected on indicators for sustainable cities, good health and well-being, and clean water and sanitation were provided by citizen scientists.

There’s scope for citizen scientists to do more. UN agencies have also recognized the potential of connecting citizen scientists with official data bodies. The UN Statistical Commission and UN Women are working with researchers in civil society organizations to produce resources, such as toolkits for producers of citizen-generated data.

The UNESCO report shines a much-needed light on some promising developments in open science. The challenge will be how to accumulate individual examples of good practice into something similar to a critical mass, so that, in cases such as monitoring the SDGs, they can be harnessed to get the world to where it needs to be.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 6, 2024
JWST is most in-demand telescope ever — leaving many astronomers in the cold

[ad_1]

Astronomers from around the world met last week to review the latest crop of research proposals for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They sifted through 1,931 submissions — the most ever received for any telescope in history — and ranked them. By the time the reviewers begin releasing their decisions in late February, only one in every nine proposals will have been allotted time to collect data with JWST.

These six distant galaxies captured by JWST are wowing astronomers

The huge demand is an indicator of the space observatory’s immense success: it has wowed astronomers by spotting some of the earliest galaxies ever seen and has uncovered more black holes in the distant Universe than was predicted. Launched in December 2021, it is the hottest property in astronomy. But oversubscription leaves many sound research projects in limbo.

“The overwhelming majority of submitted JWST proposals are very good, totally worth doing, absolutely should be done if time allows,” says Grant Tremblay, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But most of them will be rejected.”

An excited community

Using JWST can take anywhere from a few minutes for a simple project to hundreds of hours for a major survey. When researchers apply for observing time, they are competing for limited slots — some of which are automatically earmarked for scientists who helped to develop the telescope, including at the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

This is JWST’s third proposal submission-and-review cycle. During the first, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, which operates JWST, received 1,084 submissions; reviewers gave the green light to one out of every five. During the second review cycle, submissions rose by about 35%, and the acceptance rate dropped to one in seven.

‘It’s a dream’: JWST spies more black holes than astronomers predicted

For the first cycle, applications were due before the telescope had even lifted off from Earth. Many astronomers were reluctant to put their energy into writing proposals for an instrument that might not succeed, says Christine Chen, leader of the group at the STScI that issues calls for proposals.

“As time has gone on, Webb has just performed so beautifully that people are having an easier and easier time envisioning how it’s going to advance their science,” she says. “It’s natural that the community is excited.”

Still, demand for JWST is unprecedented. It has surpassed that for the 33-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, its predecessor flagship observatory. Demand for Hubble has increased to some extent over time, but for most of its lifetime, reviewers have approved between one in four and one in six of the proposals submitted.

One reason for JWST’s popularity is that it has capabilities that other telescopes don’t. It is the most powerful infrared space telescope ever built, so it can observe objects in the very distant Universe and can scan the atmospheres of exoplanets for molecules that other instruments can’t see. In fact, a proposal’s specificity to JWST is one of the reviewers’ criteria. If an experiment can be done with another telescope, it will almost certainly not receive JWST time, Chen says. “We want to execute projects that you can do no other way.”

Pain points

A large portion of the JWST proposals that get rejected are resubmitted during the next review cycle. Reviewers encourage researchers to fine-tune their submissions — usually to clarify their scientific justification for a project — and try again. Tremblay, for example, had one proposal rejected during JWST’s first cycle but accepted, with some edits, in the second.

How JWST revolutionized astronomy in 2022

“High oversubscription is horrible, but it does drive rigour in the preparation [of proposals] and ensure the science is strong,” says Thomas Haworth, an astrophysicist at Queen Mary University of London. JWST cost a lot — more than US$10 billion to develop — so “we want to make sure it does the best science it can”, he adds. “But we do need to make sure that the selection process covers the appropriate breadth of science, to maximise the impact of JWST and not just make incremental gains” in astronomy.

Would-be users are not the only ones feeling the pain of JWST’s oversubscription rate. Tremblay says that the ballooning number of proposals is placing an increasing burden on those volunteering their time to be on review panels. “It’s a lot of work. I don’t think the process as it exists now can scale up much further,” he adds.

This is not a JWST-specific problem. The holder of the previous record for most proposals — the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile — received 1,838 submissions during a review cycle that began in 2018. By 2021, ALMA, an internationally funded radio observatory studying how stars and planets form, among other things, had mostly switched to a distributed peer-review system. In this approach, a researcher who submits a proposal is required to review a certain number of their peers’ proposals in the same cycle. If they do not, their own proposals might face disqualification.

Whether or not JWST retains its current review system, astronomers’ desire to use it is likely to remain high for years to come — at least until another instrument of the same calibre opens its aperture.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 5, 2024
How to enhance lab-team efficiency with tools from the tech industry

[ad_1]

Akshay Swaminathan (top) and Lathan Liou (bottom) are coordinating the writing of this article over Zoom, Google Docs and Slack.Credit: Lathan Liou

Although we are both currently medical students, we have spent a combined ten years doing data science in academia and industry, in roles such as head of data science at Cerebral, a tele-mental-health company in Claymont, Delaware, and a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Our medical-school research involves working with clinicians and data scientists to deploy machine-learning models in health systems (A.S.) and developing epidemiological models to predict the genomic subtypes of coronary artery disease (L.L.).

As long-time friends and collaborators, we’ve often had déjà vu moments while talking about our research, finding parallels with our careers as data scientists. In particular, we both regularly find ourselves feeling frustrated by the limited use of standardized software tools in academia, which makes collaboration more difficult than it should be. These tools are commonly used in industry, so why not in academia? In this article, we describe a suite of tools that has helped us to make research projects more efficient.

Manual scheduling is tedious

Most of us have probably seen an e-mail that looks like this: “Availability: M: 1–4 p.m., T: 10–11 a.m., W: 9–10 a.m., 2:30–3 p.m., 4–5 p.m., Th: 2–3 p.m. and F: 10–10:30 a.m., 11–11:15 a.m.” and had to work out where our own availability overlaps.

The process becomes ever-more complicated as the number of meeting participants rises, especially if some of them are in a different time zone. The use of team-wide calendars with an open meeting-scheduling policy — such as Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar — enables anyone to schedule a meeting wherever a shared open timeslot is available.

If you’re trying to schedule a meeting with someone external to your institution, Calendly is a great free software tool that enables you to easily share your Google or Outlook calendar and allows other meeting participants to select a meeting time when everyone is available.

Get started by setting up a Calendly account for yourself and sharing your Calendly link when scheduling meetings.

The problem of multiple versions

Searching through our e-mail inboxes for files can be difficult. It’s particularly challenging during the preparation of manuscripts, when multiple offline versions of a Microsoft Word document are edited by different people and sent in an e-mail chain, making it hard to accurately collate everyone’s edits and comments.

Using collaborative real-time editing programs such as Google Docs greatly alleviates this problem. It ensures that everyone’s suggestions are incorporated into the same document and provides an easily accessible historical record of all the previous versions, in case there is a need to refer to deleted material — or even to revert to an older version. It also saves co-authors having to stagger the timing of their work, because Google Docs allows multiple people to work on a document simultaneously.

Similarly, for data, there are tools such as Airtable. Airtable is a good stepping stone between working with individual CSV files — spreadsheet-like files that can be used to tabulate data — and setting up a serious database. Meanwhile, GitHub is an industry-standard tool for code management. It includes functionality for code review and version control, so if conflicting changes are made to a piece of code, users are forced to address them.

Get started by drafting manuscripts in Google Docs or in Word in OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage and file-sharing app, instead of using Word or a similar word-processing program locally. Share these collaborative documents with your teammates and encourage them to suggest edits and make comments.

If your research project involves code, create a GitHub account, make a private GitHub repository, upload your code and encourage your teammates to refer to the private repository for the most up-to-date version.

The difficulty of tracking progress

The process by which a research project moves from ideation and hypothesis generation to analysis and writing involves many moving parts. As research teams get bigger, so does the complexity of managing this process. We have found that software such as Notion (Trello, Asana and Jira are alternatives), a knowledge-management system organized in a series of relational databases, can help to break down a large research undertaking into more manageable chunks. For instance, we have used visual task-management tools called kanban boards for each manuscript with the following stages: concept, research, writing, revision and publication. Each task in a kanban board has notes, an assigned owner, a task timeline and, if relevant, links to other projects.

The benefit of using these tools rather than coordinating task allocation over e-mail or text message is that everyone is kept aware of team-wide progress on tasks, and information inequality is minimized.

Get started by creating a Notion account and using one of its templates for a kanban board to begin tracking your research project.

The difficulty of effective digital communication

Two other collaborative tools we’d like to mention briefly are Miro and Loom. Miro makes it easy to create a virtual ‘whiteboard’ that teams can use to, say, brainstorm projects by creating virtual sticky notes or sketching diagrams on a blank canvas. Loom allows researchers to easily create screen recordings showing step-by-step guides to navigating a task. It is the software equivalent of having a collaborator on hand to guide you through a workflow.

Get started by downloading Loom and recording a brief practice tutorial that walks you through computer-based research protocols.

Encourage the adoption of technology

Incorporating these tools into your research team’s workflow could lead to smoother communication and more efficient project execution. Just as industry-inspired retrospective or ‘retro’ meetings — structured discussions that allow teams to reflect on finished projects — improved collaboration in academia, these tools can revolutionize how research teams operate. By embracing technology and adopting best practices from industry, research endeavours become not only about searching for scientific truth, but also about ensuring that the route taken is efficient and reproducible.

Our final word of advice is that software adoption won’t happen unless there is top-down institutional agreement or bottom-up team-driven agreement — or, ideally, both. The whole team should be on board with migrating to a new project-management workflow. If there is already a system in place that works well for everyone, there might not be any need to adopt the tools that we have described. However, if a change is on the horizon, but some team members are hesitant to commit to it, securing the support of the principal investigator or another person in authority is often the most pragmatic approach to catalysing team-wide adoption.

[ad_2]

Source link

February 1, 2024