the modern peer

Practical guide to ensure your supervisor is a catch, not a clash. Last week, we talked about the importance of choosing a good supervisor to oversee your work, whether it’s for your bachelor’s /master’s thesis or your PhD. That piece of advice sounds wonderful just ...

In a culture with permanent urgency, burnout is inevitable.

Read the post by María Botía Sánchez, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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What makes a 'perfect match' for a supervisor? When we get the ball rolling in academia, we often find ourselves just eager for an opportunity. You apply for your bachelor's or master's thesis and hope for the best, fantasising about the day a PI ...

A PhD is a mutual decision. As much as you commit to the project, they must commit to your development.

Read the post by María Botía Sánchez, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The lurking danger of people with too much power in Open Science History holds many lessons that we repeatedly ignore. One such lesson is about the concentration of power. When power concentrates around infrastructure that everyone depends on, accountability erodes...

Open Science must resist the comfort of echo chambers. Innovation comes from diverse opinions and inclusive representation that challenge the norm.

Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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A short list of things I wish I had done during my PhD This is a list coming straight from my experience and it is NOT a listicle (I hate that word. And the concept.). Just putting it out there, that I wish.. ..I had written a review in my field BEFORE ...

The days are long but the contracts are short.
You might want to read this before it all vanishes..

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu @lealoburoglu.bsky.social and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Supervisor, Mentor, or Manager? There are many academia-specific keywords: “grant”, “stipend”, “precarity”. But what is the correct designation for the leader of a research group who writes projects, manages people, supervises stude...

We sometimes use the words "supervisor", "mentor", and "manager" interchangeably...
But they most certainly do not mean the same thing.

Read the post by Luís Oliveira, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The nightmare of saying ‘I don’t know’ out loud. If you ever wondered what the academic equivalent of “the common child’s nightmare of going to school while in your pyjamas” is, chances are most researchers under 40 years old will respond the same: ...

I don’t know.
And that sounds like the beginning of something worth investigating.

Read the post by María Botía Sánchez, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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People; the problem in Open Science? If only we fixed the publishing system. If only we fixed the incentives, rewards and recognition. Open Science (OS) likes to position itself as a systems problem. And whilst these things do matter, de...

Many researchers support Open Science in principle. But if we want a real shift in academic culture, "agreement" alone is not enough.

Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Suffer-culture in academia “I spent the holidays in the lab.” “I started at 5.00 this morning.” Have you ever had that person in your team that made sure to explicitly share that they have been working during crazy hours, eve...

Independence in research does not come from being abandoned. And good mentorship is not a fixed script.

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu @lealoburoglu.bsky.social and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Science beyond the paper; blogs, podcasts and video For most of human history, science has been communicated through the spoken word. Knowledge moved from person to person through oral storytelling and apprenticeship style training. Writing helped to f...

Let's imagine that the scientific paper format didn’t exist. And that there were no journals... How would you share your research?

Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The Scientific Method and The Emotional Damage: A Tale of Two Feelings Researchers are people of science, of facts, of specifics. With the duty of being unbiased, they set their assumptions aside and prioritize what the data tells them above everything else. And yet, whe...

Science may be objective..but scientists are not.

Read the post by Luís Oliveira, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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I’m a scientist and we’re publishing too much The first step of alcoholics anonymous is to admit you have an addiction (or so the many TV shows tell me). Well, I’m a scientist and science has an addiction. It’s an addiction that every scientist h...

We’re addicted to publishing, because the system made it our only currency.

Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The politics of citing papers There was another lab working on our “favorite” protein. Not in our building, and not even in our time zone but our questions and models were quite similar. We knew of them through the usual channels:...

You can learn a lot from a bibliography.
And I don’t just mean the science.

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu @lealoburoglu.bsky.social and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Ich bin Anna - Part II ✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Catharina Sänger. With a curious mind and a passport full of lab stamps, Catharina has explored science across the globe. She studied Biochemistry in...

We tell young scientists to be ethical, curious, and rigorous.
Then reward only those who are lucky or good at selling novelty.

Read the post by Catharina Sänger and subscribe to the modern peer if you like what you read.

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Ich bin Anna - Part I ✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Catharina Sänger. With a curious mind and a passport full of lab stamps, Catharina has explored science across the globe. She studied Biochemistry in...

Behind the prestige are broke, burned-out PhDs working way too much and wondering if they are the problem.
They are not.

Read the post by Catharina Sänger and subscribe to the modern peer if you like what you read.

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Sliding labs “With the rising competition for funding, securing a grant has become less about advancing science and more about staying in science.” ↪ Mentioned recently in a Nature News article.  As you may know...

One decision that splits your life into the version of you that stays in science, and the one who writes herself out of it.

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu @lealoburoglu.bsky.social and subscribe if you like what you read.

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We Never Cross The Buildings: Why is it so hard to start a collaboration in academia? ✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Altynai Mambetova. Altynai holds a Master's degree in Data Science from the University of Manchester. Her background spans data journalism to data ar...

The most unexpected discoveries emerge when different disciplines interact.
It’s time to create systems that reward it.

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Everything, Everywhere, All at Once - or Being a Woman in Science Disclaimer I will speak from my own experience and from what I know the most — the case of being a (European) cisgender woman in academia. I don’t claim to represent or fully understand the struggles...

We inherited a system rigged against us.
But we learned to run it anyway.

Read the post by Marie-Odile Baudement, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The loss of community in open science: a sign of a failing movement? Open Science (OS) is a movement that aims to bring about a change to the academic publishing system. Yet, despite being around for over 30 years, it has had relatively limited success. Traditional pub...

Open science won’t survive if it treats community like a nice-to-have.
You can’t retrofit culture into systems built without it.

Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Welcome to the family, call me Professor When I first started my PhD in France, I couldn’t help but address my PI with the formal “you” in french (“vous”), instead of the informal “you” (“tu”). She was very quick to tell me to use the inform...

A lab isn’t a family, and it isn’t a kingdom.
Good mentorship dissolves the need to belong to either.

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu (@lealoburoglu.bsky.social) and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Accepted: Today | Received: Do You Really Want to Know? We’ve all peeked at that “Received, Revised, Accepted” section of a paper and instantly regretted it. Those dates often read less like a timeline and more like an archaeological record. And that, kids...

On paper, it’s a four-year PhD program.
But when peer review eats up half of it, is the timeline still fair?

Read the post by Luís Oliveira, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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We finally found a radical and straightforward solution to revolutionize academic publishing! … gotcha! You clicked because the title sounded extraordinary, revolutionary, amazing — didn’t it? And for a while, I found myself reacting the same way you just did. Then, spending a good hour read...

Another “breakthrough” that changes it all… until the next one.
Every time we oversell science, we teach people not to trust it.

Read the post by Marie-Odile Baudement, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The split-screen mind of the researcher “So, what experiment should we do next?” asks the student.  And two different tabs open up side to side in your mind.  Tab 1: Taking a stroll in your field In this tab, there are no real rules. Yo...

There’s a part of science that doesn’t make it into the manuscript.
That’s the part that makes it worth doing.

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu (@lealoburoglu.bsky.social) and subscribe if you like what you read.

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The costs of publishing: financial, career and personal The current system of recognition in academia is built on a single pillar; publishing. Career advancement is dependent on how much and where you publish. Assessment of “quality” is based on extremely ...

Publishing is the currency of academia.
Isn't it surprising that its exchange rate bankrupts the very people creating its value?

Read the post by The Open Fox, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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ChatGPT et al. The rise of Large Language Models in academic writing. Postdoctoral researcher Dr Verena Haage was reviewing a manuscript for a reputable neuroscience journal when she began to notice unusual incon...

The English was flawless, the author was fake, and the data made no sense.
Welcome to the age of artificial "scientific" fluency.

Read the post by Anita Waltho, and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Are you winning? By the end of my PhD, I was somewhat disillusioned by the way scientific research worked and decided to pick a field that could open up a (small) door to industry, if I ever decided to take that route...

“Are you winning?” is the wrong question.
If human knowledge is cumulative, then collaboration isn’t optional.

Read the post by Leal Oburoglu (@lealoburoglu.bsky.social), and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Purr-fect Citations: How a Cat Became the World’s Most Cited Academic Meet Larry, the Scientific Cat Larry — a fluffy, slightly overweight cat — has achieved what many postdocs or even professors only dream of: becoming the most cited “author” in his field. Obviously, ...

If a cat can fake citations and win at the h-index "game", why do we let these metrics decide our futures?

Read the post by Marie-Odile Baudement (@mo-baudement.bsky.social), and subscribe if you like what you read.

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Stranger than Fiction If doing your job requires constant applications to keep doing it, is that really a “job”?  Why do we need to keep “auditioning” for work we’re already performing? Let’s first agree that there isn’t...

You do the work. Then you prove you're still worth doing the work, again and again.
Welcome to academia. Please fund your own salary.

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Beyond Useful: When Being the Swiss Knife Backfires We all know this person. Or we are this person. You troubleshoot broken connections in the lab, fix the department printer, teach undergrads how to use the Nanodrop and pH-meter, and share all your be...

You troubleshoot, mentor, bake cakes, shoulder burnouts and fix printers; yet your CV only says ‘postdoc.’ Did you really sign up for this?

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Every rockstar scientist has an origin story Six years ago, during a science communication session at a conference, we were given the task to explain “why we do what we do” to people unfamiliar with our research. While having this chat with a fe...

Some treat every paper like their spotlight, forgetting the team writes the story. Others guide students to lead the next paper.

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Peer review is imposed, stretched to its limits, and buckling under pressure.
But its best days may still lie ahead.

Check out Part 2 of the series by The Open Fox and subscribe if you like what you read.

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