March saw eLife Ambassadors consolidating plans and taking action in a range of areas from supporting preprints to highlighting funding opportunities.
Brief updates
Ambassadors held several preprint journal clubs, including Elisa Floriddia, Kadir Akdemir and Zach Hensel (who also posted updates and resources, including how to find preprints). In addition, Luciane Kagohara introduced preprints to her lab group meetings and has been introducing the concept of preprints to colleagues at John Hopkins University.
The group working on meta-research held a couple of meetings under the direction of Tracey Weissgerber, and continued discussing potential projects whilst learning about how to conduct exploratory analysis.
In scicomm Emma Dorris blogged about why should consider involving the public in your research, providing advice about how to set up a public patient initiative and her experiences of running one. Elsewhere, Chloé Yeung and Chinmaya Sadangi started preparing to conduct interview series to help raise awareness about career paths for ECRs, and Lotte de Winde participated in the eLife #ECRWednesday webinar on coping with Brexit.
In careers Shan provided 10 tips for approaching postdoc interviews with input from the Ambassador community, and Hannah Wang gave a careers talk at a Nonsuch High School #BeInspired event on what it’s like to be a biologist in drug discovery at @ICR_London.
In peer review Ambassadors published a checklist for those starting out in peer review (created in collaboration with Prachee Avasthi) and Zach Hensel launched an initiative to start an early career reviewer pool which has attracted over 150 sign-ups this month.
Lotte de Winde curated a list of travel funding opportunities for ECRs which were posted on github by Aziz Khan. Elisa Floriddia, Lotte de Winde and Tai-Ying Lee held a call to discuss fair funding and will begin compiling a list of funding related practices, including addressing issues around parental leave.
There was a meeting of the LatAm eLife Ambassadors where they discussed topics including (1) creating a space for dissemination of research among the Latin American scientific community (2) promoting the visibility of Latin American ECRs (3) promoting collaborations between Latin America researchers located throughout the world.
Finally, Sarvi Sarabipour was a panellist on the John Hopkins University discussion on ‘Adventures in Publishing’ where she discussed open-access and open-science.
What Ambassadors are reading
A selection of articles and resources shared by Ambassadors on Slack and Twitter
- Careers – A trend toward transparency for P.h.D career outcomes? – Vivek Bhardwaj
- Careers – Building community as a career – Rintu Kutum
- Equality – How to tackle the childcare-conference conundrum – Uschi Symmons
- Equality – Persistent Underrepresentation of Women’s Science in High Profile Journals – Sarvi Sarabipour
- Funding – Fund ideas, not pedigree, to find fresh insight – Julia Steinberg
- Funding – Low agreement among reviews assessing the same NIH grant applications – Uschi Symmons
- Mentoring – Intellectual Synthesis in Mentorship Determines Success in Academic Careers – Savio Chan
- Mentoring – Mentors Help Create A Sustainable Pipeline For Women In STEM – Luciane Kagohara
- Metaresearch – Some things take a long time – Bradley Alecia
- Open Science – Making every day Open Data Day – Sarvi Sarabipour
- Peer review – The Global Burden of Journal Peer Review in the Biomedical Literature -Sarvi Sarabipour
- Peer review – The Social Structure of Consensus in Scientific Review – Sarvi Sarabipour
- Preprints – Building links with bioRxiv (F1000Research) – Luciane Kagohara
- Preprints – https://twitter.com/bahti_yil/status/971761685336903680 – Bahtiyar Yilmaz
- Scicomm – Cultivating a new STEM audience: An exercise in communicating science – Sofia Araujo
- Scicomm – How to write a first class paper – Aziz Khan
Resources highlighted by Ambassadors
- Equality – re:Work; Unbiasing the workplace – Tai-Ying Lee
- Peer review – PLOS reviewer center – Michel Boek
- Preprints – bioRxiv template on overleaf – Humberto Debat
- Scicomm – Author aid manuscript checker – Ujjawal kumar Singh Kushwaha
This month also saw Ambassadors receiving welcome packs