

+ Info

Additional Materials

Reason

• Multiple studies across the past years have pointed to the stress scientists, particularly trainees, work under, as surveyed by Evans et al. (2018), biennial surveys by Nature or this Wellcome Trust survey.
• It is widely documented that the number of faculty applicants far exceeds the posts available, as Larson et al. explore mathematically here. Naturally, alternative career paths can lead to leading a lab as well, but the level of industrial development needed for those paths is not available for all fields of science or countries, necessarily.

Philosophy

• Traditionally, modern science is thought to have arisen during the XVI–XVII century period known as the Scientific Revolution. Excellent critiques of this view have been made, but there is little question that the individual scale at which science was practiced then is far removed from the armies in lab coats that characterize science since World War II.
• Dobzhansky first made his famous assertion in an essay calling for the importance of organismic biology at the height of the 1960s molecular biology craze.

Composition

• C.R. Darwin's Origin of The Species (1859) already underscores the importance of variation.
• Hosfstra et al. (2020) analyze the academic careers of an incredible 1.2 million US PhD graduates (nearly all graduates between 1977 and 2015), and find that students from underrepresented backgrounds innovate more than their peers (despite not getting the same recognition for doing so).
• Business researchers at Harvard and Boston Consulting, among others, have established the advantages of diverse teams in problem solving and overall company performance.
• J.L. Wood (2019) outlines four strategies for diversity in recruitment practices: implicit bias training, certification of applicant pools, having diversity advocates on committees, and adopting inclusive job search criteria.
• B. Latour famously pioneered laboratory ethnographies in his 1973 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
• G. Bennett and P. Rabinow repeated a similar exercise as part of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, chronicled in 2009's Designing Human Practices.
• Fermilab hosts artists-in-residence, as do many other scientific institutes.
• Nature Publishing runs a PhD survey every year with worrying results regarding advisor-advisee relationships.
• Many people understandably argue in favor of cutting down on meetings.

Metabolism

• P. Suber wrote an excellent primer on Open Access, available for purchase in print or in its entirety online for free.
• Open Notebook Science as a movement has been around for some time as a small community
• J.C. Bradley laid down the ideas for open-notebook science in this 2006 blog post.
• Openlabnotebooks.org have collected a number of resources on the subject
• lab2web is a (somewhat crude) interactive mental map scheme made for this work, available as open source on GitHub.
• Open Knowledge Maps is a non-profit that builds visual representations of information and research.
• S. Buranyi (2017) penned an excellent chronicle on the astonishing, terrifying, and enraging ascendance of the economic model of scientific publishing in the late 20th century at the hands of tycoon and fraudster Robert Maxwell.
• Fraser et al. (2019) and Abdil & Blekhman (2019) examine the success of preprinting on biorXiv.
• Popular reprint repositories include arXiv, biorXiv, medrXiv, and psyArXiv.
• A. York has built an open source/open science powerhouse of a lab, and developed a publishing template for GitHub-hosted research articles.
• ASAPbio, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and Wellcome held a meeting on “Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences” on February 7-9, 2018. Archives of the meeting can be found here.
• Tennant et al. (2019) briefly review some of the most common questions surrounding preprints, open access, and scholarly publishing.
• Wellcome Open Research is a journal run by the Wellcome Trust operating by immediate publication and post-publication, invited, open peer review.
• Resources for navigating Science Twitter are being published on journals such as this piece by Heemstra (2019).
• ResearchHub, Knowledgr, and Qeios are all open science platforms exploring what an online, collaborative science framework can be like. ResearchGate is a slightly more established, if more traditional, social network for scientists.

Growth

• Lambert et al. (2020) survey women and underrepresented minority postdocs in the life sciences considering academia as a career path, finding they would value clearer mentorship outside the lab as well as more training in transitioning to research independence, teaching, and community-based research, among others.
• Feldon et al. (2019) find senior lab member mentorship, not direct PI mentorship, is the most important factor determining future career success for a cohort of bioscience PhD students in the US over 4 years.
• A. Iwasaki (2020) delineates an excellent series of guidelines as an "antidote to toxic PIs".
• Indeed, the literature on teaching and pedagogy is far too vast to review. In What the Best College Teachers Do, K. Bain (2004) reviews observations of over 100 college professors, which he summarizes in this 2015 interview. P. Freire's 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a seminal work in pedagogy.
• The MIT BE Comm Lab has a number of excellent online resources available to all, and there are several more initiatives like it elsewhere.
• Simine Vazire writes an editorial calling for more regard for scientists pointing out mistakes, particularly trainees.

Ecology

• The donations made by convicted sexual criminal Jeffrey Epstein to MIT resulted in an external investigation into the matter, which found serious errors in judgement on behalf of the administration even if no laws were broken. Regardless, the episode resulted in resignations within MIT and strong reaction from the public.
• "the term "general public" homogenizes a wide range of interest groups": I am aware I read this at some point in time before, but cannot recall where. Any references to this end would be welcome.
• Besides the ubiquity of #SciComm on Science Twitter, a conference on the matter has been gaining traction as of late.
• T. Caulfield (2020) is but one of many people calling scientists to step up to the challenge of making sure people are correctly informed regarding COVID-19 and its many myths, misconceptions, and pseudoscience.
• Methodologies like Community-Based Participatory Research or Participatory Action Research can involve other groups normally marginal to scientific research. The Public Lab is an interesting instance of similar kinds of approaches in environmental research.
• Lambert et al. (2020), see Growth notes above.

Miscellaneous

• U. Alon has compiled a collection of Material for Nurturing Scientists.
• MIT Biological Engineering's Grad Student Handbook is written by students of the BE Grad Board with input from the BE REFS.