A scientist should behave as a good citizen in the scientific community. You cannot  expect that other colleagues perform all the unpleasant jobs and that you can spent all your time on science.  I am referring to low-reward activities like reviewing papers, reviewing grant proposals, sitting on review panels, being an editor of a scientific journal, sitting on program committees and - which is the subject of my present post - really organizing a conference.

I still remember those days that my thesis supervisor didn’t have to justify why he wanted to buy a particular, expensive, piece of equipment. When I became a group leader those golden days were already gone forever.

Nowadays scientists fight for research money in fierce competitions. I certainly agree that some competition is healthy. Although, I would like a situation where the science policy makers themselves and the board members of science-supporting agencies, for the sake of improving their quality, would have to write and defend as many proposals as we scientists have to do; given the funding rate that these science managers find socially acceptable for us, I would suggest for them also a funding rate of about 5%.

After many years of experience I come to the following conclusion: Giving a good talk for a lay audience is extremely difficult and not very rewarding. Reading this statement will upset a number of people. So I have to do some explaining.

My first university course was in elementary calculus. The course itself was foremost a repetition of what we had already learned in secondary school and was therefore in itself not very interesting. However, those first days did learn me a lot about physicists. I was surrounded by nerds, geeks, whizzkids. Badly shaved guys, elegantly dressed with shorts, white sport socks, and sandals. Since most of them used to be the best of their class, they (and I am afraid I should include myself in this category) thought they were to a large extent omniscient. During the calculus course, they considered everything to be self-evident, exclaiming phrases like ”of course, tell me something new”. It was absolutely not accepted to admit not to understand something. Our ego’s created a non-critical atmosphere, in which questions were looked upon with suspicion. Indeed it was very unscientific.

A number of bloggers blog under pseudonym. Unfortunately these writers refer to themselves as anonymous bloggers. Writing under pseudonym means you use a fictitious name, a name different from your own, whereas corresponding anonymously means you use no name at all. On many Internet discussion forums users register under pseudonyms. Their real identity might be known to the forum moderators, but it is certainly not disclosed (unless the long arm of law would be involved, of course). As a matter of fact forum owners often warn new users not to use or reveal their real name in their posts.

In a recent post in Science Careers Blog Jim Austin argued that young researchers should get easier funding with science supporting agencies. That would be the best way to get them into the system.

I strongly object and put a reaction there, that I hereby reproduce:

This would be age discrimination. I agree that there is problem, but I think I have a better solution, or at least a solution that is worth discussing IMHO. A remedy that does not suffer from this type of discrimination. In what I suggest it is not the old guy against the young guy. It is the established scientist against the newcomer. To solve the problem at hand, in the Netherlands (physics) granting organization FOM, has come up with a scheme in which newcomers get an advantage by giving them bonus points. With these bonus points starters get funded (considerably) more easily.

For editors of scientific journals it is quite hard to find referees, leave alone good referees, for peer reviewing their received manuscripts. A good referee is a person that sends in a good referee report and does so in time, and responds quickly to additional requests from the editors. Why don’t peers want to review manuscripts of their colleagues?

There are a number of reasons. Professional scientists are very busy and - perhaps more importantly - they will never get public credit for their review job.

A young scientist in his early thirties, with more than 40 publications and a permanent position at a European university, has gotten the following comment in the judgment of his research proposal: the candidate writes articles with many different coauthors. And, that is listed in the weak points of the proposal.

I assume a scientific proposal is to be judged based on its scientific value, and not based on the personality of its author. The number of coauthors relates very much to the history of a scientist’s activities and has nothing to do with his scientific qualifications.

Young people, in tenure track positions, feel they to have to collect as many authorships as possible. Questions like “Will I be a coauthor?” and demands as “I have to be a coauthor” are part of daily conversations in science institutes.

But not only junior scientists are eager to boost their cv’s with authored papers. Seniors use their social status to fight themselves into the list of authors.

In a number of groups the list of authors is not discussed but imposed upon. The boss decides. Him being the last author is an axiom. The issue of free riders imposed by the boss, gives rise to a lot of frustration on the side of the first author.

Is it true that articles in high-impact journals involve, in average, more coauthors?

A while ago, I was involved in writing a review article, which finally included around 270 references. Being not very experienced in using BibTeX, I had to manually enter many references in my TeX-file. There I noticed that Nature and Science entries took more time to handle because they usually come with more than 4 coauthors.