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Science policy from the highest level affects everyone, not least the newest draftees to academic research. Graduates and postdocs will ultimately have their career paths carved out for them from the higher echelons of decision making, so surely it makes sense that tomorrow’s researchers should have a say about what direction these paths should be heading?

The scramble for funds, unstable workforce and training programs and the need to appease a disjointed evaluation model that has the impact factor at its crux has been widely written about. Early career researchers are thrown straight into the deep end of this melee. As they aim to develop professionally and potentially fill the shoes of their mentors, their views should be sought as early as possible because being on the front line of science means they are ideally placed to help change the culture and practice of science as we know it.

With this in mind, it is refreshing to see a dedicated group of postdocs from the Boston area who have taken steps to get their voices heard about what they want for their future. The group has organised a purely postdoc led conference that aims to approach the issues mentioned above head on. The Future of Research conference will take place in Boston, MA 2-3 October and you can still sign up to attend! To find out a little more about what the group hopes to achieve, I interviewed the conference organizers Kristin Krukenberg and Jessica Polka, both of Harvard Medical School, to get some further insights and discuss how F1000Research will be supporting them in trying to reach their goals.

F1000Research: Your post-doc group consists of over 30 individuals; can you tell us how such a big group came about?

KK and JP: Stimulated by a lot of recent reports, opinions, and proposals for reforming the biomedical research enterprise coming from senior scientists, we held a special session of a networking group we organize called the Postdoc Forum (normally, meetings consist of Harvard Medical School postdocs giving scientific talks to one another). The turnout to this session was overwhelming – these issues really struck a chord. Based on the commitment we saw at HMS, we decided to organize a public symposium and expanded our organizing group to the general Boston area through the “pan-PDA,” which is a council of all the area postdoc associations. From there, we have found a fantastic group of like-minded individuals who are invested in making science and the scientific enterprise better for not just themselves but for everyone involved.

F1000Research: Could you explain a little more about the meeting and how it will be organised and run?

KK and JP: The meeting is being organized by postdocs from 8 institutions who have been meeting regularly around Boston for the past ~6 months. We are sharing the responsibility for organizing and running the meeting including moderation. The meeting consists of a keynote from Henry Bourne, followed by panels with comments from distinguished members of the scientific community. However, the heart of the conference is the interactive sessions on the afternoon of the second day. The purpose of the meeting is really to give voice to young scientists in brainstorming paths forward to the kind of scientific future we’d like to live in. To determine what that world would look like, we’re pulling common threads out of responses to a survey participants complete with registration. Even if you can’t make the conference, you can help us by taking it here. We welcome input from everyone. Ultimately, to effect any positive change we are going to need all sectors of the scientific community working together to communicate with each other as well as with policy makers and the public.

F1000Research: The meeting itself covers a variety of topics that impact all scientists in academia. Can you briefly explain how these topics are encumbering early career researchers in particular?

KK and JP: The four topics we’re focusing on for these discussions are workforce stability, how scientists are trained, funding structure, and the incentives that drive the behaviors of scientists.

The impact on young scientists of the first two are obvious. The second are equally important though, if more subtle. For example, the way that funding is distributed – for projects, not people, and to PIs rather than trainees, definitely affects the freedoms scientists have. Furthermore, incentives presented to scientists (funding, career advancement, etc.) encourage them to publish work in flashy (high IF, as you note) journals. One could argue that this distorts science to make a simple story and reduces transparency and collaboration.

F1000Research: The challenges that you have identified as a group must surely mean that senior scientists and PI’s also realise the problems with regards to the future of research. How have you found the support from your mentors and could they do more to help the current situation?

KK and JP: We have found the senior scientists to be very supportive. For example, many of our speakers are passionate advocates for young scientists. Other senior members of the community may hold different opinions about what the future of science should look like, but on the whole we have found that they are all supportive of young scientists getting together to discuss it.

F1000Research: The meeting itself is going to bring to the fore many ideas from both early career and senior researchers on how these potential pitfalls can be tackled; how are you planning to disseminate these thoughts and make them available for the scientific community to see?

KK and JP: During the discussion sessions, we will clarify a vision for a better scientific future and discuss some proposed paths forward. After the meeting, we will bolster these opinions with some additional research and create a report of the symposium for publication in F1000Research. We’re attracted to the open, transparent peer review model of F1000Research, and we’ll use this platform to solicit as many comments as we can from the community. We’ll incorporate those into a final version, which we will disseminate to scientific societies, policy makers and other invested groups.

F1000Research: Ultimately, the meeting will help share the thoughts of the early career scientists, but what do you envisage will be the next steps of using these outputs and making things happen?

KK and JP: While we may not come to a consensus on what the best course of action is, at a minimum, we want to stimulate young scientists to become involved individually. We hope that this meeting empowers postdocs and grad students to engage with these issues and have productive conversations with not only each other, but also more senior people as well.

The decisions on how to act as a group will be influenced by the discussions during and following the symposium. Advocacy targeted at representatives in government will likely play a large part, involving both in-person visits and letter writing campaigns. We also plan to write letters and opinion pieces for a variety of journals, blogs, and other outlets to unpack some of these issues in more detail. One large problem seems to be awareness, and we will be looking for ways of disseminating these topics in engaging ways to a variety of different stakeholders.

To accomplish this collective action, we must build a community of young scientists interested in these issues, so we plan to keep the momentum going by hosting additional meetings. In Boston, we will be continuing to meet as a group by hosting periodic follow-up meetings.

Beyond Boston, we have a follow-up session at the December 2014 ASCB meeting in Philadelphia, and we’re excited about this opportunity to engage scientists from all levels and sectors. More broadly, we hope that what we’ve learned in organizing this meeting could serve as a platform or template for other young scientists to host similar symposia. To that end, we will make our organizing materials (including templates for discussion sessions) available in an open manual to help stimulate grassroots organizations of similar meetings.