University Affairs

Happy 2013 to our readers!

We’ll start this year with a summary of our autumnal posts capturing the third quarter of activity at our new University Affairs home. Both Jonathan and I have enjoyed the transition and are looking forward to a year packed with good discussion and constructive solutions. We have several guest posts lined up that will be interspersed throughout the year, but also encourage others who feel passionately about particular issues related to education and training of scientists to get in touch at contact@scienceadvocacy.org.

October-December blog posts: 

Guest Post – Banting Award winner

• An insider’s view: Banting awards falling short

Jonathan

• Funding the academic career: My journey
• The perils to research of the U.S. ‘fiscal cliff’
• The good, the bad and the ugly of gender bias in academic science

Dave

• Free journal access for postdocs in between positions
• Inaugural meeting of Canadian Postdoctoral Administrators: will fanfare = results?
• CIHR announces its third set of Science Policy Fellowships

The two most popular posts by far this past autumn were Jonathan’s on gender bias and our guest post on the Banting awards. Much discussion ensued on both. On the former, Lorne challenged Jonathan on whether or not we’d make the same choices if no constraints existed; and on the latter about the Banting awards, the discussion got quite lively, with ideas aplenty and the challenging question of whether or not Canada should have pre-PI awards.

We hope that everyone is feeling refreshed after a good Christmas break and shares our enthusiasm for 2013. We always look forward to hearing from our readers in the comments below and in guest posts.

Dave and Jonathan

This quarter has been a very busy one for both Jonathan and me. Unfortunately from my end, this meant that the scienceadvocacy.org resource site is not yet live. Things are starting to take shape and it should be launched this autumn. We hope this will be an easier-to-navigate resource page that can direct early career researchers and policymakers to the items they need without having to dig around too much or re-invent the wheel. We’ll certainly keep readers posted on its progress.

For now, here’s the quarterly recap for those readers that have been busy too!

Articles written

Jonathan:

Playing the devil’s advocate on low salaries

A framework for changing the current research economy

Academic burnout should be a major cause for concern

Supply and demand in the knowledge market

The truly bleak job prospects for young scientists in the life sciences

A response from the health minister on the lack of opportunity for early-career scientists

 

Dave:

The state of science in Canada: Not bad, but the devil’s in the details

A new way to help you choose your science-related career

UBC tops in Canada? Rimouski 7th in sciences? New metrics for measuring research

Come on NSERC, really – you’ve completely missed the point…

Grumpy old men (and women) – feedback on proposed CIHR reforms

Novel ideas for the biomedical research workforce, anyone in Canada listening?

Our other activities

Dave published a feature article in BlueSci, Cambridge’s science magazine on the training of scientists, entitled Whose Training is it Anyway?

Discussion highlights

In response to my comments on the NIH and NAS reports, S_C pitched a question to readers that sadly went untouched. I think we’ll have to follow up on it. It’s an interesting suggestion to create research-focused assistant professors for 5-10 years and evaluate their performance – good ones stay, bad ones go (I see Cambridge doing similar things, Boston too).

One of the most heavily commented and read articles on our site, the discussion that ensued from the article on NSERC restricting postdocs to one fellowship application per lifetime, was very heated. This is one of the poorest decisions that NSERC has ever made and I really think they’ve failed to see the hugely negative impact that it will have on the system – see the CAPS letter in response to this.

Popular posts this quarter

Come on NSERC, really – you’ve completely missed the point… (5,214)

The truly bleak job prospects for young scientists in the life sciences (1,914)

UBC tops in Canada? Rimouski 7th in sciences? New metrics for measuring research (1,397)

A new way to help you choose your science-related career  (1,217)

Academic burnout should be a major cause for concern (880)

Quick hit: Beth forwarded something interesting to me in a follow up to my slightly controversial critique of the Three Minute Thesis article – Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame has just launched a two minute thesis video competition to have your thesis illustrated. An interesting idea for sure and something that should aid in the communication of scientific concepts to lay audiences when complete.

Quarterly summary: Transition success

This quarter was a disruptive but productive one as The Black Hole successfully moved from our old site to being hosted by University Affairs – we are very happy with our new home and colleagues and look forward to engaging more people as the momentum for the site builds. Instead of a summer series like So you want to be a…. and Notches in the STIC, we decided this summer to focus on a resource page which we hope to launch in early autumn to help early-career researchers better navigate through the resources that we’ve spoken about in the past. Stay tuned!  

Articles written