The resurgence of Title IX and women’s rights in U.S. academia

February 24, 2016

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February 24, 2016

Less than two years ago, the U.S. Department of Education released a list of 55 institutions of higher education in 27 states that it was investigating for improper handling of sexual harassment and assault complaints. Since then, results from surveys looking at sexual harassment and assault in U.S. higher education and in the field have revealed that harassment and assault are the norm, not the exception, for women scientists.

These results have, understandably, worried universities. I won’t pretend that the worry is all altruistic. Universities deal in the currencies of prestige and reputation. Claims, lawsuits, and federal investigations around sexual harassment and assault don’t make for happy university images. Nevertheless, I believe there are many people in positions of power who really do want to do the right thing and have simply been unaware of the scale of the problem.

Interestingly (to me), the legal framework that is driving the federal investigation and many specific lawsuits is Title IX. Title IX is part of U.S. law established in 1972 following the gains made in the 1960’s for civil rights legislation. It reads (in part):

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

Title IX applies to pretty much all colleges and universities in the U.S., because if a student is getting federal assistance, then the university is, too. Title IX’s claim to fame is its application to athletics in higher education. I was a varsity athlete at Brown University in the 1990’s following a major Title IX lawsuit that was brought against Brown for not offering equal athletic opportunity for men and women. The lawsuit (Cohen vs Brown University) was bitterly fought and ended up in a settlement after the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

The impact on Brown athletics in the years following the suit (the ones I was there for) was weird. Women’s athletics received modestly more support. Men’s athletics was materially hurt. And both women’s and men’s non-mainstream sports — like my sport of fencing — suffered the brunt of the fallout [1]. Moreover, the precedent set by the Cohen vs Brown case had repercussions across the country, with universities often choosing to shut down numerous smaller men’s sports teams (fencing, wrestling, water polo, etc.) in order to come into compliance. It was not the sort of result one might hope for, and it caused a lot of resentment against women’s sports and Title IX more generally.

Now Title IX is all over the news again. Lawsuits are blossoming, and the list of institutions under investigation now numbers more than 100. Brown made a new position for a high-level Title IX compliance officer last spring. Harvard did so this fall. And the Department of Education has basically told all the universities that they’re required to hire a Title IX coordinator. Either as a result of these efforts, or because of a fear of federal investigation, several highly acclaimed tenured science professors have been sacked for sexual harassment in the past year.

Title IX has had a strong bite for women’s athletics, both at the collegiate and the high school level, enabling opportunities for girls and women that simply weren’t available previously. It will be interesting to see if it has as much teeth for the socially stickier issues of sexual harassment and assault.

Also interesting to me is that the resurgence of interest in Title IX has not been limited to sexual harassment and assault. I wrote a series of posts in the winter of 2014-15 for Dynamic Ecology about the state of parental leave for postdocs [1 2 3 4 5 6]. Last week, Meg Duffy linked to an amazing new site I had never seen before, The Pregnant Scholar, which focuses on protections for pregnant and postpartum women under Title IX. In my posts in 2014, I wrote about how unpaid job-protected maternity leave is not available in the U.S. But the site itself (and a quick email exchange I had with a lawyer who works for the project) makes it clear: if you are a grad student or postdoc at a U.S. Institution, you are have many legal rights, including protected time off for recovery from birth. Universities must treat pregnant and postpartum women like all people who need accommodation for medical needs.

As far as I know, there are not yet lawsuits to set precedents in the realm of Title IX and pregnant and postpartum women, but there undoubtedly will be. (And my heart and gratitude go out to those women who while trying to do science and parent a baby are — and will be — also taking on their institution and engaging the legal system.) In the meantime, I hope the growing interest in and awareness of the protections for women scientists under Title IX give early career women scientists hope, a decreased sense of isolation, resources for negotiations, and avenues for recourse should they be needed.

 

1. For example, women’s sports were forced to take more recruits than they could reasonably provide equipment, playing time, and coaching for in order to keep roster sizes up. Men’s varsity roster sizes were so limited that as few as two simultaneous injuries or illnesses meant teams had to forfeit matches. ^

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Parent accommodations at ESA 2016

February 15, 2016

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February 15, 2016

Abstracts for ESA’s annual August meeting (in Fort Lauderdale this year) are due soon — a week from Thursday. And if you are early career and a parent, you may be making your decision about whether to attend or not right now. For many of us early career folks, presenting at the meeting is required to find the funding necessary to attend. And so if you’re a parent (or a soon-to-be parent), you may be weighing the pros and cons of attending the meeting — and therefore of bothering to submitting an abstract [1].

This year, there is a small posse of us, under the indomitable leadership of Sarah Supp, the chair of ESA’s Early Career Section [2], dedicated to making the meeting as family-friendly as possible. In particular, we have gotten agreement from ESA leadership to guarantee:

  1. Lactation rooms at the conference center. Private, quiet, and clean rooms for moms to nurse their babies or to pump breast milk. These rooms will be appropriately furnished and supplied for both nursing and pumping, including having refrigerators to store pumped milk.
  2. Free and unhindered access to the convention center for child caregivers. In other words, if you are attending the meeting and you’ve brought (or hired) someone to take care of your kiddo(s), this person can freely enter and exit the convention center with your kiddo(s). Note that this caregiver will not have access to any of the talks, sessions, or other events (including the poster hall). So if you and your partner are both attending the ESA meeting to see talks and plan to trade off childcare, you’ll still both need to register for ESA.
  3. The usual on-site childcare contracted with a childcare company for babies and young children (traditionally it has been KiddieCorp), as well as a summer camp program for older children. I have never used the on-site childcare, but I have checked it out at several meetings, thinking that I might use it at some point. It appears to me to be professionally run, with a very good caregiver-to-child ratio.

We are also hoping to secure a quiet space for parents and guardians of every gender to relax with their young children away from the over-stimulation of the main hallways, as well as a bottle warmer to facilitate baby bottle-feeding. No guarantees on these yet, but we’re working on it.

I know firsthand that attending ESA as a parent — with or without your children — is fraught with trade-offs. We’re hoping we can make attending a little bit easier.

 

1. ^ You can, of course, submit an abstract and then withdraw it by the May 1 deadline if you decide not to go, but if you’re a parent, then your time is likely extremely constrained and you’re not going to be spending that valuable time writing abstracts that you’re likely to withdraw.

2. ^ Join the Early Career Section!

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Reflections on my first first-author pub (and the seven years it took to get there)

February 10, 2016

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February 10, 2016

Coincidentally coinciding with my birthday, my first first-author publication came out this week. A nice birthday gift. Considering the paper has been seven years in the making (and that I’ve only been in the ecology field for a little more than nine years), this publication is also a moment for reflection for me. I’m hoping this post is useful for grad students (don’t follow my example) and, perhaps, their advisors.

When I began graduate school, I had few illusions. I knew that I would not only have to learn the field of ecology (to which I was brand new), but that I would have to excel if I wanted one of the scarce good-quality jobs after I graduated. So I set myself some concrete goals. And I met all of them, more or less, with the exception of one. I had intended to have all but one of my dissertation chapters published by the time I defended. (In retrospect, I would have considered “submitted” to be a success.) When I actually defended, I had 0/4 chapters published and just 1/4 submitted (and rejected).

What took so long? There are many reasons that I can group into three areas: 1. The personal, 2. Mentoring, 3. The academic publishing system

The personal

The personal is pretty straightforward. During these last seven years, I have had two babies and have moved cross-country three times to accommodate my growing family and job opportunities for me and my husband. When I am squeezed for time in months before birth and the year or so following birth and the month or two before a move and the several months after a move, I’ve had to focus on the most immediate priorities. When I was a grad student those priorities were: ensure I had funding and was making progress toward a dissertation. (Because the bar for a dissertation is lower than for publishing, I made progress towards publishing, also, but not past the dissertation goal post.) When I was a postdoc, those priorities were simply: keep up with the responsibilities of my postdoc position.

Further, once I started my postdoctoral position, I had a full-time job on top of a full-time family. Unlike the childless, I could not squeeze publishing my dissertation chapters into my evenings and weekends. I had (and have) a forty-ish hour workweek and am contractually obligated to work full time on my postdoc project. (This latter issue is actually a structural problem in academia, but intersects the personal in a profound way, so I’m lumping it under the personal here.)

Mentoring

Both my graduate school advisors are older, established – and highly successful – scientists. Their approach to publishing may be due to their expectations of high-quality research or simply due to the norms that were in effect when they were becoming scientists multiple decades ago. In any case, the general culture in both labs was one of “wait until you have something very important to say, and then publish in a very high impact journal.” This isn’t a crazy approach; many of my labmates and lab alum became authors (sometimes first authors) on Nature and Science articles as grad students. But it is a risky approach. While I was gently prodded to work on getting papers ready, I had little guidance, in part because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Writing comes easily to me, and so I assumed that when the time came, writing up journal articles would be relatively easy. (Boy, was I wrong!)

I was very thankful for an experience I got assisting one of my advisors with one of his papers. (I did the modeling work for the paper.) As he worked on the paper, he brought me into the process, showing me his thinking of how to frame the paper, then realizing that another bit of data would really strengthen the argument, then reframing the paper, and so on. It was only then that I began to realize that writing was integral to the process of science. It isn’t like writing a lab report in school, where you do the experiment, analyze the data, and then write the paper. Instead, often, these steps are intertwined. This is a totally important point that I wish I had learned earlier.

For my current postdoc, my advisor/boss is younger – an associate professor – and more in tune with what is needed to get an academic job these days. He is highly publication-oriented, with the idea of “what paper are you going to write?” guiding the scientific process the whole way. He is prolific, and his graduate students generally publish more than one paper before defending. I should note that he is prolific in the positive sense; he doesn’t believe in publications just for the sake of publications. Instead, he believes that little bites of research shouldn’t be wasted. Individual steps in a larger story can be their own papers. They should be solid science in their own right, but they can be bricks in a wall or stepping stones to an island — or whatever science-is-incremental metaphor you want to use.

In retrospect, I realize that I could have written quite a few short and straightforward papers as a grad student that would have been worthwhile to publish. And in retrospect, I wish I had learned that publishing one or two of these smaller papers would have been very valuable. At the time, I thought that it wouldn’t be a good use of my time – that I should spend my limited time on coming up with something bigger and better, something impressive. But the process of scientific writing and publishing is a series of learned skills. And I think it might be much easier to learn these skills on a simpler, less high-impact paper. Instead, my first paper has had quite a saga.

The academic publishing system

Which brings me to the third area: academic publishing as an institution. I am (obviously) fairly new to the scientific publishing world, so I want to tread carefully here and not make any broad generalizations. Here’s the path my one paper took, and I am not implying that this is a common path (but maybe it is; I don’t know).

I spent several years working on the paper’s content, interrupted by two cross-country moves and a baby-having. I started writing the paper in earnest in 2013. I was running out of grad student funding and needed to finish my dissertation. I wrote up the paper for publication and submitted it at the end of July. It got sent out for review and came back in September: reject. My energy at the time was fully focused on my defense, which needed to happen by the end of the year. This paper got put aside; it was good enough for a dissertation chapter, and that was all I needed to maintain a steady income (and therefore the childcare I needed to finish writing my dissertation).

Then I moved cross-country again, started a new job (my postdoc), and had another baby. The paper sat. I finally picked it up again in January of 2015. The original rejection had been mainly due to an addressable modeling issue. So I ran lots more model simulations, and updated all the text and numbers. The additional modeling hadn’t changed the main story qualitatively, just the details. Now I had a conundrum: where should I submit it?

The journal to which I’d initially submitted — Ecological Applications — seemed like the best fit. This paper is somewhat big and complicated; it’s got a conservation story, a wildlife disease story, and a modeling story. But I’d already submitted there. So I tried sending it to a methods journal next. I rewrote the intro and conclusion, and revised the rest of the paper for a new audience, and submitted it. It came back as a desk reject: “This isn’t a methods paper. It’s a conservation paper. Try sending it to our sister journal such-and-such.”

So I rewrote the intro and conclusion again, revised the text again for yet a new audience, and sent it to the conservation journal. This time another desk reject: “This isn’t a conservation paper. It’s a methods paper. We’re not the right journal for you.”

At this point I was beginning to despair. I couldn’t seem to find a good fit, except for that original journal, where I had lost my chance due to a methods issue. I was also starting to get angry. (Did I mention that I had a full time job and a full time family? I really didn’t have time to keep reframing my paper.)

Discouraged, I wrote to my grad advisor: “am I allowed to resubmit to the journal that originally rejected the paper?” I assumed this was against the unwritten rules, rude, and would be unwelcome (which may be a gendered reaction: see this piece!). But it had been over a year and a half, and I had addressed all the reviewers concerns. My advisor led me though how to do a re-submit. And I did.

And after this point the story is (mostly) all rainbows and sunshine. I resubmitted in March, and the journal sent it out for review. I had an awesome subject matter editor, and two awesome reviewers, all of whom really challenged the methods and scientific interpretation in a respectful and constructive way. One of my reviewers signed his review. And being able to talk to him about methods made a huge difference, both in terms of my confidence in what I was doing and in terms of scientific interpretation. The paper is much better due to the review process, and I am very grateful to the time and diligence the editor and reviewers spent on it.

I did a round of major revisions. And a round of minor revisions. And in May, it was accepted!

Then it sat in preprint mode, behind a long list of already accepted manuscripts, until the end of 2015, when my paper finally made it to the front of the line. And then ESA contracted with Wiley to do publishing and everything got delayed slightly as the whole publishing house got transitioned over to new management. (The article coming out this week — the second week of February — is in the “January” issue…) But the paper is finally formally published. Yay!

Reflections

The experience leaves me with some opinions and questions about the whole process, though:

  1. Grad students: In year 3 or 4, write a paper all the way to journal submission. It doesn’t have to be big and flashy. It doesn’t have to be your life’s work. Think about it as a practice manuscript. Going through the process of writing and publishing is a whole education in of itself. Get those skills as a student and not as a postdoc! (Don’t do what I did.)
  2. Grad advisors: Take your 2nd or 3rd year graduate students (or 1st year if they did a Masters) through the process of writing and publishing — an actual active manuscript, if possible. Teach them how to write, of course. But then, also teach them to write a cover letter. Show them that they will spend more time than they ever expected on framing and selling, on getting figures just right. Teach them how to read journals’ mission statements and how to pick a journal with a good fit. Show them that they need to be mindful of word limits and figure limits, and maybe you can’t actually have your figures in color for the journal with the best fit. Tell them that they may need to pick an editor and they’ll likely need to recommend reviewers, and teach them how to choose. Let them see what reviews look like, and show them how to write responses to reviews. Show them what “proofs” are and what to look for before returning them. These things all become routine (I imagine) over time, but first-timers don’t know them at all.
  3. I am kinda down on the whole “fit” thing. I understand that journals have specific audiences and so forth, but if a paper could justifiably be directed at multiple audiences, what should an author do? I am glad that general-purpose journals have emerged in the last decade, so that an author needn’t get completely stuck on “fit”.
  4. I’m a proponent of open science. But I also really think peer review is vital, and at its best, is immensely helpful. I don’t think the two conflict.
  5. Now that everything gets “published” online, in addition to (or instead of) being published in print, what the heck is the difference between an online “preprint” and a “published” article anyway? Once an article is available to anyone who wants it and can pay, shouldn’t it be considered “published”? Different journals treat accepted-but-not-yet-in-print articles differently, and it’s horribly confusing. Can we all just agree on a new paradigm where generally available = published?
  6. Manuscript trickle-over is a serious problem in academia — both for science itself and for scientists who cannot commit to more than a full-time paid job. It needs a solution. I haven’t come up with a full one yet, but the issue will likely be grist for a future post.
  7. Signed reviews are the best. I am planning to sign my reviews from now on.

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Stop using unlinked footnotes, please!

February 8, 2016

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February 8, 2016

Please, please, for the love of the 21st century, stop putting unlinked footnotes in your blog posts. I know, I know, “everyone” does it. But you guys, it’s really rude.

What’s an unlinked footnote? It’s when you write something, and then wanting to comment on what you just wrote (or give references or whatever), you put a little asterisk * or two ** or more *****. And then down below at the bottom of your post, you write your little comment.

Do you know what this does to your readers? They start reading your post. And then you force them to stop reading and scroll down to the bottom of the post to read the little thing you wrote there. And then scroll back up and do lots of visual search work to find where the left off reading the main text. This is a really rude thing to ask your readers to do online. Value their time. They will appreciate it.

Okay, so what should you do? I hear you say, “I’m busy, I can’t be bothered to do anything complicated.” Fine, then if you must write at peak laziness, do this: don’t use footnotes at all; use parenthesis. You could even go all fancy and use brackets or curly braces. Your readers will get used to it. They will understand that what you say is a parenthetical. { I mean how else would someone interpret a curly-braced comment? } You even save yourself the time of scrolling up and down to add the footnote when you’re writing. Peak laziness achieved!

Still really like footnotes? Okay, no problem. But link them. (Please link them!) The Web’s philosophical foundation centers around the “hyperlink,” which allows a reader to jump from place to place without having to move in a sequential fashion. This is what makes it so powerful. This is what makes it different from print books and newspapers and magazines. Harness that power!

You should ideally link both from your main text to your footnote and then back up from the footnote to where the reader left off in the main text, so you don’t leave them floundering. How do you do that? You use something called “anchor links,” which tells a browser what to show when the corresponding hyperlink is clicked. An anchor links is where a link points to.

If you’re on WordPress, do this when composing your post:

  1. Switch to “Text” mode from “Visual” mode. There’s a little tab to do this in the upper right, when you’re composing a new post.
  2. Find the place you want to link TO, i.e., the footnote itself at the bottom of the page. *
  3. BEFORE the footnote, type <p id="linkname"> and substitute a unique-to-that name for that footnote for linkname. (I use names like foot1 and foot2. So, for example: <p id="foot1">)
  4. Now you can go back to “Visual” mode.
  5. Go to the place in your main text where you want the footnote. Type in a footnote symbol such as ***** or [1], select the symbol, and then click the ‘Insert/edit link’ button in the WordPress toolbar.
  6. In the URL box, type #linkname, substituting the unique name that you chose in step 3. (For example: #foot1). Make sure the box for ‘Open link in a new tab’ is NOT checked.

And that’s it! You now send your readers automatically from your main text to your footnote with a single click. No scrolling or hunting needed. You should do the same thing for the reverse direction, allowing readers an easy way to jump back into the text. You can do this by using the caret symbol (^) as the link in the footnote [2], which has become the conventional way to do this.

If you’re on Blogger or any other blogging platform, the process is essentially the same. Go the the place where you can alter the HTML directly, add in the anchor link (step 3 above), and then make a link to the anchor using the # symbol with the anchor link name (step 6 above). You can search for specific directions for your blogging platform using the term ‘anchor link’ if you need more help. And I’m willing to bet dimes to donuts that there are plugins for all major platforms that will let you do anchor links with the click of a button.

So please link your blog footnotes (if you must use footnotes at all). It’s a little thing to do, and your readers will thank you for it.

 

* Here is a footnote!

***** Here is another footnote.

1. Don’t you think the numbered footnotes look better than all those asterisks? Who wants to count asterisks once you get above about three? You can get really fancy and use superscripted numbers to give your posts a polished look.[3]

2. ^ It would look like this. Click the little caret to go back to the main text.

3. To do this, go into “Text” mode and put <sup> before the [3] and </sup> after the [3].

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The Problem of the 12 Hats

February 3, 2016

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February 3, 2016

I can’t think of any other profession that requires quite the diversity of skills as a scientific academic. By the time you’re a tenure track professor, you are expected to be proficient in a dozen skill sets, each of which is sufficient for a profession in of itself [1]:

  1. researcher and expert
  2. statistician
  3. grant writer
  4. non-fiction writer
  5. public speaker
  6. diplomat
  7. visionary
  8. classroom teacher
  9. mentor and trainer
  10. accountant
  11. office manager
  12. recruiter

Note that I say proficient and not excellent. You need to be proficient in most of the core 12, but you need to be excellent in at least a handful of these 12 to make it to the tenure track in the first place. But how is one supposed to learn all these skills? As I pointed out, excellence in just one or two of these would qualify you for a (probably higher paid) job in industry. And yet, academics are supposed to master the whole suite.

In theory, that’s what graduate school (and postdoc positions) are all about: learning these skill sets – the things that will make you an excellent professor. But graduate school (and postdoc positions) are typically very skewed in the skills they teach. Here’s my rough break-down of typical training [2]:

  1. researcher and expert: classroom training, apprenticeship, trial-and-error
  2. statistician: classroom training, apprenticeship, trial-and-error
  3. grant writer: apprenticeship, trial-and-error
  4. non-fiction writer: apprenticeship, observation of others, trial-and-error
  5. public speaker: observation of others, trial-and-error
  6. diplomat: observation of others, trial-and-error
  7. visionary: trial-and-error
  8. classroom teacher: observation of others
  9. mentor and trainer: observation of others
  10. accountant: none
  11. office manager: none
  12. recruiter: none

And this leads to the 12 Hats Problem: namely, that academics are expected to be proficient-to-excellent in an impossibly wide range of skills. They’re expected to wear 12 big hats. And yet, it’s unachievable for one person to have mastered all those skills by early-to-mid career, and I don’t know anyone at any career stage who is excellent in all of them.

I think the most prominent tension is between the skills that are considered the skills of a scientist and the so-called soft skills that are the skills of a teacher. These days, a professor is typically expected to be quite good in both. R1 universities stress the former and primarily undergraduate institutions stress the latter. But I’ll argue that it makes a lot more sense to allow academics to specialize much more than they currently do.

For starters, classes on teaching are almost never required by graduate programs – and they’re often not even offered. Teaching is an acquired skill. Science pedagogy is an entire area of research. For many (most?) newly minted assistant professors, the first year’s teaching learning curve is brutal. Taking people who are excellent in a wide range of science-based skills and hiring them to perform a job for which they are novices is ludicrous. But somehow we think it’s normal.

I think there are many benefits for universities to start to hire people for narrower job responsibilities. Science might be more efficiently done if research scientists had lighter teaching loads. Students would almost surely benefit from having instructors for whom teaching isn’t a secondary job. Science teachers might feel more fulfilled, as they could justify spending more time on learning, pedagogy, and classroom prep. I’ll even go so far as to suggest that specializing would help with diversifying science. For those whose time and energy must be split between professional and non-professional endeavors – be they dependent care-giving, management of personal health conditions, or diversity advocacy – wearing only a half-dozen professional hats increases the feasibility of juggling academic and non-academic duties.

I’ve seen this begin to happen at the University of Minnesota. For the many general biology courses, the university is hiring Teaching Professors. These positions are tenure track and teaching heavy. Like at many liberal arts colleges, there is the expectation of some research during the summer. But in the case of Minnesota’s Teaching Professors, the research is expected to be pedagogical rather than domain-oriented.

I think this is great, but we could go even further. Do great teachers of general biology really need to have PhDs? I don’t think so. Why not create paths that combine a Master’s level research project with a teaching certificate? These would be professionals who have a good command of science knowledge, who understand research, who have connections to the research community, but who also understand pedagogy and are focused on teaching. We need both things, of course: scientists who are professional undergraduate-level teachers AND good-quality positions (i.e. permanent with benefits) offered by Universities. I think everyone would benefit.

I’ll end by saying that I’ve really only talked in depth about separating two major academic hats. I think there’s a lot to be gained by even further specialization. I expect that established academics will balk at the idea. After all, it’s (sometimes) fun to have so many hats, and change is always hard. But in academia, we know that subpar mentoring is a problem. Science outreach is a problem. The lack of tech transfer within academic science is a problem. And these problems all stem from the expectation that professors be experts in too many domains. To solve them, professors may need to doff some of their many hats.

 

[1] ^ And there are additional skill sets for which an academic might also show proficiency: editor, fundraiser, publicist, mathematician, computer programmer, construction engineer… You can probably think of more. I list the 12 core skills above that I think are generally required of everyone.

[2] ^ Definitions: classroom training = actual classes on skill set; apprenticeship = significant one-on-one training with an established academic; observation of others = witnessing others performing the skill set or the results of that performance of the skill set; trial-and-error = the chance to practice the skill set during grad school/postdoc years

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Grad students: Want to learn to be awesome at science communication? Attend ComSciCon

February 1, 2016

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February 1, 2016

Hey you guys! Applications are now open for ComSciCon, which is a science communication workshop for graduate students. In particular, applications are open for the national workshop, which is an awesome experience.

ComSciCon is three intense days (all expenses paid!) of learning how to better communicate science – whether that’s written, spoken, or multimedia. I attended the first ComSciCon as a grad student in 2013, and it blew me away. The speakers were amazing. The other students were equally amazing. The workshop is cross-discipline, so you’ll meet people from all across the sciences, as well as professionals working in every science communication career area you might be considering. They also invited me back last year as a panelist, and I was honored and excited to get to go back again. I talked about citizen science, but I think I learned more than I taught. Again, if you are considering a science communication career (or even if you’re just passionate about it), you should really try to attend this workshop!

June 9-11 in Cambridge, MA

(Applications open until March 1)

There will be panels on these topics (and more):

  • Communicating with Non-Scientific Audiences through Media Outlets

  • Communicating through Policy and Advocacy

  • Communicating through Creative Outlets and Storytelling

  • Communicating through Education and Outreach

  • Communicating with Diverse Audiences

Caveat and advice: ComSciCon has become very popular and is now quite competitive. The application is short, and last year there were almost 1,000 applications for 50 spots. You will be more competitive if you can demonstrate something you’re already doing in the science communication realm. And you will be most competitive if you can show initiative and/or innovation in conducting science communication (rather than signing up with an established program to do science communication). There’s also an effort at geographical and other types of diversity. So if you have a diversity aspect to your science communication, definitely make that clear in your application.

If you’re just getting into science communication or don’t get accepted to the national conference, you might keep your eye on the “local” ComSciCon events. These are less competitive and they don’t fly you to the host site, but I’ve heard good things about them. There’s an event coming up in May in North Carolina. And previous events have happened in Chicago, Boston, and at Cornell.

 

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Postdoc Land: the Wild West

January 27, 2016

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January 27, 2016

What is a postdoc anyway? Grad students are fairly well-defined: If you are enrolled at an accredited university, working towards a Masters or Doctorate degree, you are a grad student. If you are told someone is faculty somewhere, or a lecturer, then you might have some questions about exactly what type of position the person has. But you nevertheless understand that the person is employed by a university to teach undergraduates and/or do research, with (depending on the type of position) possible additional duties including teaching and mentoring graduate students, institutional service, and the associated responsibilities that go along with those main tasks.

But a postdoc… There is really no universally accepted definition of a postdoc (but see here). For one thing, postdocs can be employed by organizations other than universities. The federal government employs many postdocs. Some non-profit organizations, do too. So do government labs and government-supported research centers.

A postdoc is traditionally thought of as a short-term, usually fixed-length position held shortly after the attainment of a PhD, but before attainment of a permanent position. What’s weird is that there are many jobs out there that fit this description that are not called “postdoc”. What I’ve seen is that the term postdoc itself generally applies to jobs where the employee is underpaid (with regard to their abilities and credentials) in exchange for the nebulous promise of an enhanced skill set, professional network, and CV. In theory (and perhaps sometimes in practice), the postdoc is building towards a permanent position, and in ecology that position is typically a tenure-track position.

But because of a lack of definitional cohesiveness, postdoc positions can be confusing. If you’re a postdoc, you’re probably doing at least a little bit of research, but not necessarily. You might be a support person enabling others to do research. You might be managing a team of field technicians, you might spend all your time in a lab, or you might be in front of a computer all the time. You might be teaching or doing outreach or science communication as your primarily responsibility, as part of your job, or not at all. You might be mentoring undergraduates or graduate students, or you might not.

The way postdocs are classified can be confusing. For example, a ‘Postdoctoral Fellow’ isn’t necessarily on a fellowship (but sometimes is). A postdoc can be a regular employee of an institution or can be an independent scholar loosely affiliated with an institution. A postdoc can be classified as “student” or “staff” or “academic personnel.”

If you are a grad student looking for a postdoc position, you should do your homework carefully. Because of the wide range of postdoc appointments, nothing is guaranteed. And there are many surprises. For academics who have gone straight from college to grad school, a postdoc position may be your first (and possibly only) experience being a full-time employee. While many postdoc positions are, in theory, a mentoring relationship, the financial and legal contract is usually one of employee-employer (unless you get an independent fellowship).

One surprise is you may find  yourself on the clock. Some universities and the U.S. federal government require that employees — including postdocs — fill out timesheets. Forty hours per week, timed to the quarter hour, butt in the office (or lab or field). Perhaps some flexibility from week to week — or perhaps not. (Much flexibility for U.S. federal postdocs was removed following the Sequester.) Such a regimen can be challenging to someone used to working his or her own hours.

Another surprise: as a postdoc, you’ll likely be paid monthly. This can be very difficult for anyone who doesn’t happen to have a month’s worth of living expenses (or more) in savings for that first month. It’s also challenging if you’re living close to your means (likely if you have dependents), as you need to keep close tabs on your finances to make it to the end of each month.

Got a prestigious fellowship? Congrats, you won’t be an employee. You probably won’t have to fill out timesheets. But if you’re in the U.S.,  you also won’t likely have access to healthcare and other benefits through your institution. When deciding whether a fellowship is worth it, make sure the stipend is enough to account for the extras — health care being the most expensive — but also short-term disability and other benefits, especially if you need to support dependents.

Postdoc positions can be great. Depending on your advisor/boss and the details of your position, you may have a lot of flexibility over your time and/or research direction. You will probably learn something new and develop new skills. You will probably meet new and interesting people. You will hopefully contribute to scientific knowledge. But remember to vet possible postdoc positions carefully — just as you did graduate school. Make sure that there is a match not just in terms of research topic and boss/advisor personality, but also in terms of the raw logistics and economics of the job.

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Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to “read more”

January 20, 2016

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January 20, 2016

You hear the self-indictment again and again: “I really should be better about keeping up with the literature,” “I need to read more,” “my goal for the year is #365papers”. Do you know anyone that says “I read too much”? How about, “I’ve got it all down pat and read just the right amount to keep up with the literature”? Yeah, me neither. Now maybe it’s just that people who might say those things are sufficiently humble. But I suspect at least one of them would have written a “how-to” paper or blog post by now.

So basically no one feels like they read enough to know what’s going on everywhere and all the time in their field. And yet there are plenty of very successful scientists out there. So what’s going on? I suspect that this idea about “keeping up with the literature” is an outdated one — a cultural holdover from when fields were more compact, publication rates were slower, and you actually could keep decent tabs on what your peers were reading. I’ll point out that in some other fields less sprawly than ecology, there are aggregators that actually do allow scientists to more-or-less keep up with literature in their field. No such thing exists in ecology — or even a subfield of ecology —  to my knowledge.

Not too long ago people read hard-copy newspapers for their news. Scientists received paper copies of journals weekly or monthly to read. The amount of easily-accessible information was small, and it was possible to read it all. Of course, it’s important to note that while these people might have thought that they were up-to-date on the news/scientific literature, they were missing a big chunk of information. The local newspaper was light on international news, for example. And scientists picked a handful of their favorite journals to subscribe to, missing all the related information that appeared in other journals. Not too long ago people used implicit filters — which newspaper to subscribe to, which journals to read — and made sure their filters matched those of their peers.

Now information is much more accessible. And that is a good thing. But it also makes it harder to choose what information to consume. Instead of implicit filters, we often need to construct explicit ones. My feeling is that older scientists who are used to the up-front filter still try to use this method: they read journal tables of contents, for example. But younger folks have grown up with an on-demand just-in-time information approach. They know that when you have too much information to consume, you don’t sort it, you search it. And you become comfortable with missing things, because you rely on your social networks to bring anything you missed that is important to your attention. And if you and your social networks miss something important when it comes out? No big deal. That important article is waiting at your fingertips for when you do discover it.

Being comfortable missing things is not easy, but is important, I think, for doing science these days. I personally read in spurts. I read a lot when I’m thinking about starting a new project. And I read a lot when I’m writing introductions to papers. But my reading is quite targeted in both cases and I do a lot of explicit searching. In the interim, I rely on pointers from my lab groups and my colleagues to important articles I should read, as well as picking up stray articles here and there based on my social media accounts and Google Scholar’s suggestions. Have I missed things? You bet. In fact, I missed just about everything published between about 6 months gestation and 9 months postnatal for both of my kids. That’s 2 years of literature or about 20% of the time I’ve been working in ecology. But I didn’t miss everything. I still got pointers to the most important articles and simply read them later when I had more time. I sometimes discover a cool article from those gaps when doing a spurt of reading. And this is fine.

When someone says “I should read more,” what I hear is: “I’m afraid of missing something.” I humbly suggest that missing things is unavoidable, but you’re unlikely to miss important literature for very long. Instead of resolving to read X number of papers per week/month/year, maybe it’s better to focus on strengthening your scientific networks. Maybe instead of resolving to read “more”, resolve to forward links to cool papers to your colleagues (via email, Twitter, or whatever makes sense for your particular network) and encourage them to reciprocate. Maybe instead of trying to keep tabs on everything being published, join or form a journal club on a topic that interests you to help search the literature more efficiently. And in any case, don’t spend energy worrying about “keeping up with the literature” in the old sense. That train has left the station.

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Analysis preregistration gets a big boost in the form of a million dollars

January 18, 2016

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January 18, 2016

The Center for Open Science has recently issued The $1,000,000 Preregistration Challenge. What is preregistration? Briefly, the idea is to reduce “researcher degrees of freedom.” Researchers often explore their data and then make data-processing and analytical choices based on the data that will be analyzed. But this can lead to biased results and incorrect scientific inference. Recent meta-studies have found a surprisingly high level of non-reproducibility in psychology and biomed, and this has no doubt spurred increased interest in techniques that can potentially make studies more reproducible. And preregistration is one such technique.

When I first heard of preregistration, I thought, “huh, well, sure, I guess in theory that would be a good thing to do.” But I also thought, “why would I do that? It’s quite a bit of extra work and doing so won’t benefit me in any way.” Like all of us, my time is limited and very valuable. I do cost-benefit analyses all the time on whether or not to do things. And preregistration wasn’t even close to the break-even line.

But this Preregistration Challenge may tip the scales for me. $1,000 is not to be scoffed at. And 1,000 recipients isn’t a small number of awards. I have a major new project coming up that I haven’t yet started analyses on. And the timeline for awards distribution seems quite reasonable. (In other words, the awards won’t all be won by projects that are fast and in disciplines that have fast publishing turn-around times.)

It’s pretty clear that for preregistration to become the norm, academic culture will need to change. And cultural change is hard. This challenge is a neat way to get a lot of people to experiment with a new practice that they likely wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise.

Oh wait.

Maybe I’ll take it all back. There’s a list of ‘eligible’ journals one can publish results in. And I assumed this list was just to vet journal repute — i.e. you can’t win if you publish in a journal that doesn’t actually do peer-review. But the list is actually journals that are open science friendly. And ecology journals are poorly represented on the list. Which is a problem, of course. But nudging ecology journals towards more open practices is not something I have the time or energy for. Boo. Maybe I’ll preregister and hope that by the time I publish, there are more ecology journals on the list.

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Is citizen science ethical?

January 13, 2016

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January 13, 2016

I was really surprised the first time someone asked — I think it was in a review of a proposal — about whether it was ethical to do citizen science. “Isn’t this exploitation?” was how the concern was phrased. Getting unpaid people to do what was previously paid work might seem problematic. As citizen science has grown, so too has thoughtful criticism of the practice.

The term ‘citizen science’ covers such a wide range of activities that I think it’s hard to address the ‘ethics of citizen science’ broadly. As citizen science is broad, so too are its ethics, covering everything from completely ethical to unethical.

First, my favorite type of ‘citizen science’: volunteers take part in some part of the scientific process. They are not monetarily compensated, and instead the rewards are such things as authentic contribution to science knowledge, access to and communication with professional scientists, community belonging, and fun. My first citizen science project Snapshot Serengeti falls nicely into this category. The volunteers enjoy the project so much that when they’ve finished classifying a batch of wildlife images, they beg us to give them more images to classify. This is clearly not exploitation. And I feel it’s quite ethical.

One could actually posit, though: is it ethical to scientists to allow unpaid non-professionals to assist with the science process. In theory, if it became widespread enough, unpaid volunteers have the potential to do work that is currently done right now by undergraduates, graduate students, and technicians, potentially reducing job availability. I honestly think that this won’t happen. There is so much potential work to be done that citizen scientists don’t pose a job security risk to anyone in the science pipeline. For Snapshot Serengeti, we tried to use undergraduates. But even though we had a dozen of them, we still didn’t have enough person-power to go through our millions of images.

Okay, next up: ‘citizen science’ that I more generally refer to as ‘crowdsourcing’. In these types of activities, people are paid small amounts of money (or other tangible compensation) to do a tiny slice of science work, such as classifying a single image or answering a single question, typically online.

This practice of piecemeal work was revolutionized by the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace, which facilitated its broad-scale adoption. However, the general concept of small payments in exchange for a small amount of data has been around for a long time. As an undergrad, did you ever participate in the psychology department’s experiments? I did. You got $5 or $10 for participating in whatever short experiments they were conducting at the time. More recently, I’ve signed my kids up for experiments at Harvard’s child development center — you get $5 and parking. Hardly worth the monetary compensation, but I find it really neat to see what they’re investigating. The social sciences have been using this general practice for decades and now have fully embraced Mechanical Turk (a 2012 how-to paper has more than 900 citations). They have also been thinking about the ethical implications.

There are issues of low wages, lack of protection for workers, and general lack of oversight. On the other hand, it’s not entirely clear how Mechanical Turk workers are using the site. The workers are NOT all low-income people in poor countries struggling to get by and trying to do solely using Mechanic Turk. In fact, I imagine it’s very likely that many workers are squeezing Mechanical Turk work in between other obligations when they otherwise wouldn’t have generated any income — stay-at-home parents during children’s nap times, employed people during their bus commute, etc. For these people, this practice is highly beneficial. My general feeling is that a scientist ought to be thinking hard about ethics if they go the piecemeal work route for citizen science, because the ethics are a bit murky and the potential for exploitation is real.

Lastly: ‘citizen science’ as education. Most funding for citizen science at the national scale is for educational purposes (for example, this recent NSF Dear Colleague Letter). I love the idea of people learning more about science through doing actual real research. However, I worry a lot about so-called ‘citizen science’ that asks volunteers to do unpaid work that results in data that are never used. In my mind, this is not citizen science at all, but rather very elaborate lab experiments. Science knowledge — not just data — must be the result for an activity to be called ‘citizen science,’ in my mind. However, educational funding opportunities typically do not provide the necessary support for post-collection data use, including both careful design to ensure usable data and the human resources necessary to analyze the data — and do something with it (publish, provide feedback to managers or policy-makers, etc.). Volunteers generally don’t sign up because they want to be educated at, they sign up because they want to make a difference, because they want to contribute. Asking volunteers to engage in authentic science research and then throwing away their efforts is, in my mind, unethical. And it happens (quietly) too often. (I should be careful here to note that some primarily educational citizen science projects do produce usable data and do make an effort to turn that data into shared knowledge. And I think those projects are great and ethical.)

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