From ScienceMag:

After more than 3 years of rallying and union organizing, early-career researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw a new contract go into effect this week. The agreement—the first to be negotiated by a union representing scientists at a federal research facility—includes provisions that limit work hours, guarantee paid parental leave, and provide protections against harassment for the roughly 5000 nonpermanent researchers, including graduate students, postdocs, and postbaccalaureates, who work at NIH facilities. The deal also promises to boost pay, which could set a precedent for other institutions—but raises will not be instated until 2026 at the earliest.

“We didn’t win everything we wanted,” says union bargaining team member Emilya Ventriglia, a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Brown University who is doing her research at the National Institute of Mental Health. “But I think we got somewhere that was really incredible and is going to really provide some transformative gains for not only fellows today, but fellows of the future.” In an email to Science, an NIH spokesperson wrote that the agency “looks forward to a positive labor-management relationship as we implement the contract.”

The union, called NIH Fellows United, struck the deal with NIH last month, almost a year to the day after the Federal Labor Relations Authority granted it approval to form in December 2023. The final 3-year contract, which was supported by 98% of union members in a vote last month and approved by the Department of Health and Human Services this week, will provide a range of protections and benefits, including the right to appeal to a neutral arbitrator in cases involving harassment, bullying, and other workplace disputes; paid leave for parents and others who need to care for a family member; up to $1500 in relocation benefits per union member; the right to adhere to a 40-hour workweek unless a project calls for a greater number of hours; a formal process for requesting remote work accommodations; dedicated time for professional development and training; and access to gender-neutral bathrooms.

The contract also increases pay. Graduate student stipends will increase from the current minimum of $46,100 to $50,400. Minimum pay for postbaccalaureate researchers—who work for NIH after receiving a bachelor’s or master’s degree—will go from $41,700 to $44,806. And postdocs, which make up roughly one-half of union members, will see their minimum pay rise to $68,544, a modest increase from the current $67,200.

William Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, says the deal could be used as a reference point for early-career researchers who are negotiating contracts with their own universities. For instance, they could push for similar pay levels and benefits. They may also want to copy the contract provision that “makes a 40-hour workweek the baseline,” he says.

Pay was among the last contract details to be nailed down during the 8-month negotiation. At one point, NIH representatives told the union they could “not bargain over economics,” according to bargaining team member Marjorie Levinstein, a neuropharmacology postdoc at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. (NIH didn’t respond to questions about negotiations over pay.) Federal employees are legally prohibited from going on strike. But after union members held a rally in October 2024 to demand a fair contract, additional bargaining sessions were held to negotiate salary levels and other final details, such as health care benefits.

Still, union members won’t see changes to the paychecks until next year at the earliest; NIH told the bargaining team it will need to request new appropriations from Congress. The contract also includes language that allows NIH to “pause or reduce” the stipulated pay increases if there are “insufficient available appropriations.”

The delay and lack of a guarantee is frustrating, Levinstein acknowledges. “It was definitely something we were trying to push back on,” she says.

But the planned eventual pay boosts, which include annual increases, would be a welcome relief for NIH researchers in the future, Ventriglia says. “A large majority of us are in the [Washington,] D.C., … area, and it’s just, frankly, so expensive, and everything keeps getting more expensive.”

Having the overall contract in place also gives union members some peace of mind as change comes to the White House. “With any administration change, there’s always uncertainty,” Levinstein says. “Having our working conditions set in this contract before that happened was definitely an important thing to get done.”

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From ScienceMag:

After 10 years working as a chief technical officer in industry, Boon Han Lim decided it was time to go back to academia. That had always been his dream. But he soon found his research wasn’t advancing as quickly as he’d hoped. One reason, he suspected, was that he was under constant pressure to meet specific benchmarks, such as publishing in high-impact journals.

Lim, now an associate professor at the University Tunku Abdul Rahman, wished that evaluations of his job performance took a more holistic view of his work. And he’s not alone. Researchers around the world have voiced complaints about having to prove their worth through simplistic measures of their productivity. It’s an issue that particularly impacts lower income countries, according to a new study published this week in Nature.

“Unfortunately, quantitative … evaluation metrics continue to play a predominant role in developing countries,” says Laura Rovelli, an independent researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) who has studied research evaluation practices. Still, crafting more diverse and inclusive ways to evaluate research can be challenging, she says, as there’s no standard way to do it.

Lim co-led the study after joining the Global Young Academy, a society seeking to give early-career scientists throughout the world a voice. After speaking with other members, he realized he wasn’t the only one frustrated with academia’s assessment process; many wanted to see a broader range of contributions, such as societal impacts of their research, be counted. So he joined the academy’s group that was exploring how different countries evaluate researchers for promotion and led the study from 2018 to 2020, after which Yensi Flores Bueso, a researcher at University College Cork, took charge. “I said, ‘Right, I have a problem. So I also think I should contribute a little bit of my effort to [solve] it.’”

The study, which was authored by researchers around the globe, analyzed policies for determining whether a scholar should be promoted to full professor at 190 academic institutions and 58 government agencies in 121 countries. Overall, the team found that 97% of policies mentioned research outputs. Most also mentioned a scholar’s teaching (93%), funding (79%), mentoring (75%), awards (69%), and community service (63%). But the policies varied widely between universities, and some put more emphasis on specific metrics than others.      

The findings also revealed a link between a country’s average per capita income and how institutions decide what researchers get promoted. Policies in high-income countries put more emphasis on a scholar’s visibility, including engagement with the academic community and the general public as well as the number of awards they received. Low-income and upper middle–income countries, in contrast, focused more on publication metrics, such as how many papers a researcher published and how many times those papers were cited.

It’s possible that some institutions rely on quantitative assessments of research productivity to an even greater degree than was detected in the study. Lim’s team was limited to looking at the public policies that were available; they didn’t review the evaluation processes themselves, so they couldn’t tell how much evaluators—often other professors at a university—were relying on publication metrics in the background to make their decision. “Even if the policy is silent about the use of metrics, the external reviewers may refer to them, or not, depending on the disciplinary norms,” says Lisa Wolf-Wendel, associate dean for research and graduate studies in the School of Education & Human Sciences at the University of Kansas.

Rovelli hopes the new study will start a dialogue about differences between countries and how institutions should think about developing new practices. She notes that in 2022, CONICET added a requirement that scientists working for the agency submit a narrative resume during their promotion evaluation process, which gives them an opportunity to discuss their professional trajectory and the contributions of their research. The Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel in Brazil––the agency responsible for training higher education staff in the country––also recently added an “impact on society” category to its promotion evaluation process to evaluate the social, environmental, and economic benefits of a researcher’s work.

Despite the persistence of policies focused on publications, Lim says he reminds scientists around the world, especially those starting out, to stop thinking of themselves as paper generators. “This to me is not that healthy,” he says. He decided not to rush in his career to achieve high-productivity metrics during evaluations. “I have several projects which have been carried out for more than 5 years but yet to publish,” he says, “because I want to come out with more solid contributions.” He often reminds his colleagues and students: “Go do what you are interested in … and what you feel can impact the world.”

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From ScienceMag:

I was 3 months into graduate school when I realized my project was doomed. I had set out to build on the work of a previous student, but as I ran into roadblocks, it became increasingly clear that the previously published work was fundamentally flawed. The data didn’t make sense; the results couldn’t be replicated. I raised my concerns with my supervisor, but he was convinced there was a reasonable explanation. I clung to his reassurances for a time, assuming no one would publish something blatantly wrong. As weeks of digging and hoping turned into months, though, the cracks started to widen. Eventually it was undeniable: The paper was riddled with serious problems.

My supervisor was the corresponding author on the published paper, and when I told him he grew indignant. “I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal out of this. Mistakes happen all the time. People mislabel things, they forget. Do you really think that in 5 years you could look me in the eye and say you’re 100% confident in everything you did?” He leaned across the desk, his gaze stern, while discomfort washed over me.

“Yes,” I answered, with more defiance than certainty. Honest mistakes were one thing—mislabeling a tube, losing track of a sample— but to my fresh, first-year grad student eyes, to publish an entire paper built on a mountain of mistakes was inconceivable.

I had heard stories of sloppy science, and worse. But I saw them as cautionary tales, not something I would have to personally grapple with during my first year of grad school. For the most part, I had been taught to view science as a domain of rigor and diligence, kept on track by the guardrails of both scientific scruples and peer review. But I was beginning to realize the people who did science were just that—people.

To publish an entire paper built on a mountain of mistakes was inconceivable.

• Ph.D. student
• a research intensive university in North America

Because I couldn’t build on the work, my supervisor instructed me to redo the original publication, eager for me to show the problems were no more than minor oversights. I painstakingly repeated the methods, which involved reanalyzing data. It was frustrating to not be setting out in a new scientific direction. But eventually, after I completed my exhaustive retracing of the original paper, I had something to show for my work.

With a knot in my stomach, I carefully presented a list of issues and mistakes to my supervisor. I told him about incorrect data analysis and experimental design, results that couldn’t be replicated, and claims that were contradicted by the data. My supervisor’s initial patience and silence slowly gave way to defensive interruptions. He dismissed some discrepancies as minor and insisted other errors weren’t worth mentioning. Nobody likes the bearer of bad news, and I was aware I was risking my future. I’d need his support to continue in the program, and someday I would be turning to him for reference letters. But I couldn’t back out now, and I was resolute on wanting the scientific record to be corrected.

I pushed for a complete retraction of the original paper. My supervisor instead lobbied for a small correction, an addendum to gloss over the errors. As the corresponding author, he was in communication with the journal. The journal editors convened a special meeting and reached their verdict: The issues were too systemic and serious for a simple correction. The only viable course was to retract the original publication and replace it with a paper describing my analyses. I felt vindicated and relieved: The errors were as serious as I thought, and I had been right to expose them.

Afterward, other faculty members commended me for standing up for research integrity. Their support, however, couldn’t change the fact that I never wanted to have to choose between truth and peace again, especially not while existing under the thumb of my supervisor. I have maintained a good relationship with him through it all. But the experience was utterly exhausting and I understand why early-career researchers, if faced with a similar situation, might choose silence over speaking up. It’s not easy to point out errors, especially when they’re attached to the name of someone who holds great power over you.

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From ScienceMag:

Most Ph.D. scientists in the United States stay in the labor force notably longer than the average person—into their late 60s and in some cases beyond—according to new data from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Often they retire, only to return to work later. The finding won’t surprise younger scientists trying to land faculty positions in departments heavy with older scientists. But by showing scientists often stay on because they want to preserve a professional identity, the findings point to the need for employers, such as universities, to develop and implement creative policies to help older scientists step aside without losing the sense of engagement they value.

The new peek into retirement patterns is based on responses from roughly 125,000 scientists and engineers ages 75 or younger to NSF’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients. For the latest iteration of the long-running survey, NSF added new questions about the decision to retire or keep working. The findings, released last month, showed 40% of U.S.-based respondents between 71 and 75 years old continued to be employed in some capacity; that’s roughly double the 19% figure for the general U.S. population. Among those still-working scientists, more than half had previously retired and returned to work, often part time.

Some went back to work because they wanted additional income and social connection, according to the survey; others were asked to return. But the most common reason cited was a desire to retain their professional identity. The findings make clear that many older professionals want to stay engaged with work, says Roger Baldwin, a professor emeritus of higher education at Michigan State University who has written about retirement in academia. “The old view of retirement is changing.”

The data don’t distinguish retirement patterns for scientists in academia from those in other sectors such as industry or government. But Donna Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas who studies the academic workforce, suspects most of the older workers are academics.

Engineer Alison McCarthy, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and chair of the National Postdoctoral Association’s postdoc council, agrees. “There’s a lot of older professors.” She can understand where they’re coming from. “They probably enjoy their jobs; they probably want to keep going.” But the phenomenon can be discouraging for younger researchers hoping for tenure-track jobs, she adds. She asks older scientists, “Can you just donate your time, maybe, if you are in a good spot [financially] so that there can be new, fresh ideas and more jobs for people?”

Ginther agrees that tenured professors holding onto their positions may prevent early-career researchers from finding jobs. But there’s no guarantee that an academic retiring will open up a new position, she adds. “Universities have been substituting non–tenure-track jobs for tenure-stream jobs for decades.”

When Carole Goldberg, now a distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, became vice chancellor 14 years ago, she was amazed by how many faculty members who were eligible for a full pension hadn’t retired—especially given that many would have been better off financially if they had retired. She made it her mission to figure out what was holding people back and to devise strategies for meeting their needs. “I wanted to make it clear to people that retiring did not necessarily mean forgoing one’s desired professional activities,” she says. Instead, it “gave you the opportunity to cast off those that were less desired.”

Some academics, she found, didn’t want an “emeritus” title because they feared it would hinder their ability to get grants funded and receive speaking invitations. To remedy that, she asked the university to create a new “research professor” title for retired faculty who were still engaged with research. Goldberg’s office also began to host panel discussions with retired faculty, highlighting how they were taking advantage of what the university offered. Such outreach, along with other adjustments to how the university engaged with professors on the issue, led to a spike in retirements, she says. “It was pretty dramatic.”

Volunteering can be a source of fulfillment for those for whom it would be “shock to the system” to give up all work, says theoretical physicist Helen Quinn. When she retired in 2010, she transitioned to 2 years of full-time volunteer work chairing a report on K-12 science education for the National Academy of Sciences. Since then, the professor emeritus at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has continued to volunteer as a science education research and policy adviser. It was “a way to continue my work as a scientist, thinking about how science should be taught and learned,” she says.

Baldwin did something similar for his own retirement, taking volunteer positions as the president of the Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education and on the board of trustees at his undergraduate institution. The continued access to professional activities has been key, he says. “I do feel a sense of continuing purpose and engagement.”

“People are living longer and healthier lives,” he adds, “and we as a society need to come to grips with the fact that retirement is not necessarily a period of leisure anymore.”

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From ScienceMag:

“Good afternoon, everyone. Glad you all could join me today. I am excited to share my research on …” Uh-oh. “I am excited to share my research on …” Oh no! No! No! “… my research on …” Why is this happening to me? My knees were buckling; my throat felt drier with every second. It was the annual seminar at my department, where all Ph.D. students had to present their research progress. I looked around the lecture hall and saw 50 pairs of keen eyes staring at me, anticipating my next words. I was certainly not glad they had joined me, nor excited to be speaking.

Although I felt confident at my work bench and comfortable discussing my research with my mentor and lab mates, my introvert nature silenced me when I faced a larger, unfamiliar audience. Prior to graduate school, I had no experience in public speaking, and now the fear overwhelmed me. But with another seminar just a couple of months away and more public speaking ahead, I refused to let my nerves hold me back again.

I took a drastic step outside my comfort zone to sign up for an open mic event at a local stand-up comedy club in Bengaluru, India. I’d always admired the confidence of stand-up comedians, and I thought the jovial atmosphere might allow a bit more room for error.

Although my jokes did not receive thunderous applause, I was surprised to find I enjoyed my time on stage. And I felt I could do better. I approached Sania, a brilliant comic whose wit and eloquence made her the highlight of the evening. Sania offered three invaluable tips.

“Attend more open mic events,” she advised. “Watch more comics perform.” Though she meant to help me succeed as a comedian, her suggestion helped me improve my upcoming research presentation. For the next few months, I attended numerous seminars at my institute, observing how skilled orators presented their stories and conveyed complex scientific data through easily digested takeaways.

Sania’s next piece of advice was to write and rewrite a script. Although some speakers can improvise, I found value in preparation. The script was a bridge from my cluttered thoughts to spoken words. It helped me maintain a logical flow, avoid rambling, and refine my timing. Most important, having a clear road map reduced my anxiety.

Sania saved her most valuable advice for last: Practice! With my script in hand, I began to rehearse my research presentation tirelessly. Alone, with colleagues, and even with unsuspecting visitors—every audience counted. I practiced every pause and hand gesture. Initially, it felt forced and unnatural. However, with each iteration, my presentation became more fluid and organic. Slowly but surely, my words morphed into muscle memory.

When the time came for my next research presentation, the difference was clear. My confidence, eloquence, and presentation skills had improved dramatically. I finished to applause rather than an awkward silence.

I took a drastic step outside my comfort zone to sign up for an open mic event.

• Avraneel Paul
• University of Alabama at Birmingham

Unexpectedly, this process benefited my research. I began to view science through a storyteller’s lens. Instead of merely presenting the results of my experiments, I used my data set to tell a story. The genes and proteins I studied became enigmatic characters in an unfolding drama. I sought to identify gaps in the narrative of my research and design my experiments to advance the story.

I have continued to sharpen my public speaking skills on various stages and now share my research with confidence. But I’ll always be grateful for that pivotal moment of stage paralysis—when I failed to convey my findings despite months of painstaking research. That experience taught me that generating data is only part of doing science. Effective communication is just as important.

After coming to the United States for a postdoc, I joined Toastmasters, a nonprofit that aims to help people master public speaking, and I’m now the president of my university’s chapter. I share Sania’s advice to prepare and practice with researchers who attend our meetings. I also tell them data points and graphs aren’t just numbers and lines—they tell stories. Realizing that is the key to sharing them with the world.

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