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How Publishers and Librarians Can Work Together to Support Early Career Researchers
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How Publishers and Librarians Can Work Together to Support Early Career Researchers
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Segment:0 .
Welcome, everyone. I think we're going to go ahead and get started. While people are still strolling in. Thank you so much for choosing to come to our panel. We're very excited about this and have been thinking about some of the questions around early career researchers and how publishers and librarians can work together to support them for quite some time.
The five of us are quite an eclectic group, representing both publishing side, librarian side, as well as the researcher and practitioner side. But the more established researcher and practitioner side. One one voice that certainly missing, I'm realizing, is the actual early career researcher. Even though we have spoken to a lot of them. But before I go on, let me introduce myself and the panel.
I'm ANCA puska. I'm executive editor in International Studies on the book side at Springer Nature. And alongside me. You have Bridget Scholl, who's senior consultant at gold leaf. Doctor Jessica mbenga, who is one of our series editors for the human rights interventions book series at Springer Nature. We have a Saudi Arabian, yamakasi Yamasaki.
I'm very sorry. So who's the head of communications. The US communications at Springer Nature. And we also have Elliot Hibbeler, who is head librarian for scholarly and platforms at Boston College. Oh, actually, before I move on to the next slide, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the format of this presentation, because we designed it so that the second part of it is much more interactive.
So we'll try to keep our presentations themselves relatively short, and then we're going to try to break up into groups so that each and every one of you have a chance to speak and think about a number of questions that we're going to put up on the screen. And it mainly has to do with just how you think about early career researchers in your own work, within your own institutions, and where you feel there might be opportunities and gaps that we could fill up.
And we have a Miro board that we've set up. You should all be able to access the Miro board. I think only us will be able to actually take the notes. So you'll have a representative in each of the groups from the panelists taking notes, but you will be able to see those notes at any point, even after the panel. So who are early career researchers.
There we all recognize that they're a very unique group within the research ecosystem, and there's quite a lot of variation in terms of the expertise that they have, as well as in terms of the needs and the opportunities that are there for early career researchers, and it varies per researcher. It certainly also varies per institution. Some institutions dedicate more effort to supporting this particular group, while others are still in the process of starting to do that.
But I think overall, we all recognize that early career researchers are effectively our future. So it is in our interest to support them. And as you'll see, as I get to my last point, it's also in our interest to keep them within the research universe so that they don't leave at the end of their PhD or postdoc. So any work on early career researchers is an investment in the future.
They are the future of research. And supporting them, I think, is in our collective interest. They're also the majority workforce. According to research, achers tend to make up the majority of the research workforce, and they are the ones who have usually the most active research life with very unique expertise. Some of the literature that we've looked at suggests that they are really the ones that are much closer to the data than even some of the more experienced researchers.
More importantly, they are digital natives. They are a lot more adept with technologies, whether it's AI or whether it's understanding open science, open data. And they are much more interested in driving innovation in the research landscape. In most instances, you will likely find an ally in early career researchers when it comes to any form of innovation, partially because they're the more curious nature and the fact that they're not always set within existing structures and institutions.
Direct engagement. This is probably one of the main points that we also wanted to focus on. There's a lot of variation in terms of how institutions, particularly publishers and librarians, which is what we're here to discuss, how they actually engage with early career researchers. Oftentimes, a lot of the polls that Bridget will show us later on show the fact that early career researchers still receive information mainly via their supervisors.
They can certainly go on the internet and find a lot of additional information, but it is that's their trusted source. And unfortunately, a lot of those sources aren't necessarily up to date with the latest that is happening in the publishing world or even in terms of what the libraries are able to offer or beyond. So it's very important to establish that direct opportunities for that direct engagement, coordinated support.
What we're basically trying to argue via this panel is that we should be offering coordinating support, that there are natural alliances that can be formed in this case between publishers and librarians, but also beyond that in order to support early career researchers. SSP does a great job, and we've just heard during the award launch, it's supporting people at that early career stage.
And it's that kind of model. Following that kind of institutional model is just one way in which we can offer that coordinated support. And most importantly, we also want to be able to offer continued support. Post PhD research shows that about 80% or more of ecrs are moving away from academia post PhD. They're going into sometimes other research related fields or industry and ongoing support for these levers, so to speak, can be difficult because they're not usually our traditional market, particularly for academic publishers.
We're not often set up to deal with these PhD post PhDs that are leaving academia. So thinking about that group as well and paying attention to them is going to be quite important. I'm going to pass things on to Bridget now. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. So like ANCA said, early career researchers really are the future.
Not only are they the largest segment of researchers and academics, but their needs will really help drive change and innovation in our industry. So for the sake of the interactive session today, I thought I would just help the framing with a few of the salient points for us to consider as a group. So despite the perception that ecrs are interested in innovative or experimental publishing or scholarly communications.
The need to adhere to the current paths for career advancement are still pretty powerful motivators. So ACR is continue to aim for those traditional and well-regarded publishing outlets to be able to advance their careers as a result. But that being said, there's still a fairly strong sense from ACR that peer review needs improving. And while career advancement might pose some limits on how much willingness there is from ACR to publish outside of traditional outlets, that's not so much the case with discovery of research.
So there's definitely growing use of alternative sources. So like sci-hub or ResearchGate. And the main factors for this are convenience and/or lack of access. And when it comes to open access, it's widely recognized and understood that ACR is lack access to funding in the same kind of amounts and ease as more senior researchers. And there's already a lot that ACR need to get up to speed with when they're entering that publishing environment.
And so as those models have diversified, there's even kind of that much more to understand and to engage with. But at the same time, hopefully that will present new pathways to OA for those. Akers and while I is, of course touching on all aspects of scholarly communications across all career stages, it's worth noting that a majority of Akers see themselves using AI for things like conducting research, writing that research and manuscript preparation, as well as handling large information sets.
For Akers, though, in particular, there's a concern that I could exacerbate existing inequalities or disparities, and especially with concerns that researchers that have access to those paid for AI tools could then speed up their publication process or benefit in other ways. One of my sources for these slides is a project on Akers called the harbingers of change project if you're not already aware of it, I thought it might be of interest for this group.
This study investigated the scholarly communication, beliefs, and practices of Akers for a decade on a regular and continuing basis. It was an international collaboration across the US and the UK, Australia, China, France, Israel, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal and Spain. And this project found, quote unquote, cracks specific to Akers in the scholarly communication system. So those are reputational assessment, unethical and questionable practices, collaboration and networking and peer review.
So I won't talk through all of these in detail, but just some food for thought for the next portion of our session is things like reputational assessment could be more holistic and consider factors like transparency or openness. And another thought around the evolving role of digital platforms. Those offer both pros and cons for collaboration and networking for Akers, so there's still a need for those in-person opportunities.
But Akers have the most difficult time accessing the funding to attend those conferences or in-person events, and it would benefit the most from publishers and librarians helping facilitate those collaboration opportunities. And finally, just to seed our discussion a little bit further, here are some opportunities that jumped out to me based on both my research and what I've seen in my work. So there are opportunities for us to provide resources on how to drive the impact of Akers research, and this could include both what they can and can't do with their work online.
And like I just said a minute ago, to create opportunities for Akers to collaborate and/or network with other researchers or partner with organizations that do that. Just one example here is sense about science, and to design consciously to prevent AI from exacerbating existing disparities and inequalities, and to be able to provide information about how to harness AI responsibly and once again, what's not permitted, what they can't do, and to help build research capacity.
So this is an undeveloped opportunity. Still, when we think about the potential benefits of a transition to a more open access or O oriented publishing environment. So a few examples here could be supporting non HPC open access models, providing ACR specific resources on publishing and creating researcher services such as training. So I'll close with this quote from the harbingers project. Listen to Akers.
They know what they're saying, and in doing so, give them a voice. Thank you. OK can you see me. How did you do it. Yeah, that's. At my height. Discrimination yeah.
So thank you all. It's good to be here. And I am going to talk about my exposure, my direct engagement with Akers as somebody who's had maybe a not so traditional and a very traditional academic career. So the first two decades of my career were academic. I spent 10 years in the Netherlands, at the Netherlands Institute for human rights research, part of the law school at Utrecht University.
Traditional, well-funded, plenty of publications ending in the publication of my monograph with Penn Press. Subsequently, I had a decade in the US at a large public University in Cuny, teaching at a senior college in the Bronx at a Hispanic service serving Institute. So from research to teaching and then four or five years at Stanford University in administration, developing curriculum with faculty on human rights and community engaged learning.
So that was two decades in academia. 2019 I transitioned from academia into the global development humanitarian relief space as a human rights educator, a human rights advocate. And at the same time, I was introduced to my editor at Palgrave MacMillan at the time and launched co-launched with my co-editor, Irene Hadi at Leiden University.
We launched a series of human rights interventions. So transitioning out of academia, where do I encounter the EC, the ecr? And that question that has really been interesting for me. So in the development, the humanitarian space, I've been working on issues such as early childhood development in refugee settlements in Kenya or LGBTQ rights and faith based allies in grasping LGBTQ rights, ending violence against women and girls in Liberia and in Burundi and in those spaces.
Who do I bump into. I bump into x. And really, my role has been as an editor who is also a practitioner, has really been to provide the direct engagement and the accompaniment. How do you allow the ACR, who feel they're no longer an academic, to recognize their knowledge, products that they've accumulated in that practitioner space.
And that's the guidelines, the White papers, the policy research for the government of Nigeria and Rwanda and Burundi and Ethiopia to recognize these products as knowledge products and to accompany them in the process of adapting them for the theories. And I have one example from our series, which you can look at. And that's a publication by Doctor Jackie ogaga.
Doctor Jackie ogaga is a colleague that I worked with closely. When I worked in the faith based space. She was with World Vision. We worked together with Episcopal relief and development, American Jewish World Service, Islamic relief on various gender projects. I came to realize she was a doctor. She had a PhD from University of Bradford, and I also came to recognize that she had helped us recognize that she had a large portfolio of knowledge projects, and she had her dissertation that had been gathering dust, as many dissertations do, on gender, women, Kisii, Maasai women and peace building in Kenya.
And we were able to work together, work together, and find the resources and the time to help her develop the thesis and the work she had accumulated in a 20 year career and development into that book publication. So that's my contribution as somebody who is an academic, not an academic, and confronted every day with early career researchers who are advocates, who are activists, who are practitioners, and who have a body of knowledge and products that can be published.
Thank you. All right. Hi so I'm Elliot Hibbler. I'm the head of scholarly platforms and discovery services at Boston College libraries. Just to situate that Boston College, despite its name meaning college, is a research University classified R1 in the Carnegie system.
And we have graduate schools in management, law, nursing, social work, education and theology, but no Med school. So not quite the level of Johns Hopkins or somewhere like that. And when I brought this to me, it was really interesting because in the library we don't really classify, we don't think of our user groups as early career researchers. We're very role focused in our patron base. And so I was thinking, well, these users are really in a few different places.
So one is, of course, I'm going to go out of order. The first is new tenure track faculty. Faculty are, of course, very important at the University, and they get a lot of our attention. So for these early career researchers, we come to them with collection support. They start at the University and we ask, what do you need us to buy for you. We give support to your research assistants.
We do everything we can for them. And we also understand their goal, as we mentioned earlier, is to go from tenure track faculty to tenured faculty. And one way you do this is via your publication portfolio. So we are very cognizant of those needs and as supportive as we can be. Another group that we actually don't see much of in the library are postdocs. So here are my postdocs.
I'm really talking about people who work in various labs and centers on campus. This can definitely be your scientist working in a biology lab, but we also have centers that deal with things like education, definitely the humanities and social sciences part. And we have also found that the really main link to communicate with these people is through their supervisor, either who runs the lab or who runs the Center.
We, of course, provide support to them. They come to the library, we answer their questions. They have our credentials, they can use all of our resources, but we don't even have a direct way just to email all the postdocs on campus. It's just having to find piece by piece. Where do you get to these folks in the final place we support Akers is actually adjunct faculty. Now, of course, a lot of adjunct faculty are not Akers, but there is a subset of adjunct faculty who are recent PhDs.
They haven't found that tenure track position yet, and they are working at maybe two or three universities, I think more typically in humanities and social sciences, just trying to stay in the academic game. We of course support them with our collections as well. We support their teaching and they're primarily focused on teaching, but this is really trying to make me think about ways we can support people who are not tenure track faculty, but who want to get to that step.
So that's the ways I see that going. And to cheat a little about ways to the idea phase that we're going to be talking about, it really is about communication. We'll have different events for faculty, adjunct faculty. And then maybe an event for PhD students that there's not much difference on some levels between a first year postdoc and a PhD student in finishing their dissertation.
They both have the same publishing needs, maybe the same publishing knowledge, and we need to think about how we can bring these different groups together that have common interest in their careers. While they don't look the same to us when we're dividing up our I guess it's kind of a business conference when we're looking at our market segmentation for library users. How do we come across these different sections. So just a preview of things we'll be talking about in a minute as a group, but just ways to think about how we can support these people in the library.
And so now I'm going to pass it on to Zoe to talk a little more about this group. Hi, I'm SEO Yamasaki, head of communications for the United States for Springer Nature. So if we want to figure out what exactly it is that early career researchers need as far as support, they're probably the right people to ask.
And so I really like this study actually from Springer Nature on nature master from a nature master classes and this nature Research Academy survey, because when we asked Akers which of the following skills they felt they would benefit from training in, there were some interesting insights that arose. So as you can see here, of course peer review, leadership, some of the expected areas there.
But then I also see something very interesting. We see that lots of Akers think that they need some training around communicating their research to the public. As a matter of fact, in this and other studies, we've seen that 97% of researchers who say the right skills are essential also think that soft skills, 81% of them soft skills like communication and networking and so on are crucial for their visibility and collaboration.
And 81% in this study found it difficult to explain their work to non-scientific audiences. So at a time during which science is facing some headwinds, it's more important than ever that early career researchers are able to explain why it is what they're doing is important, and there's an opportunity here for libraries in partnership with publishers to help this community.
So I'm going to move on. So these are the areas that we think are relevant. And I should preface some of this by saying that at Springer Nature, I lead our early career researcher program, which is a means of unifying the various initiatives that we've got going on around the company globally to support early career researchers, so that there really is a targeted programmatic effort at this group libraries are able to help us with this skill development where acres are concerned.
So science communication, networking and collaboration, academic writing. These areas are spaces in which publishers are able to provide material, provide information, so we led as part of the early career researcher program, some pilot workshops in partnership with librarians last year, the year prior. And one really interesting thing that would happen is you'd go to the library and you'd say, what do you think.
Your group of Akers and whether it's the chemistry department or whatever, what do you think they'd be interested in. And this was an opportunity for librarians to do just what Elliott said earlier and go find these people and figure out those paths. And this also helped them gain more visibility with the research office, which we heard sometimes weren't as aware of the breadth and depth of the work it is that librarians are doing.
And so there really was this kind of nurturing of connections and relationships that we started to find ourselves doing as part of this effort. And then they'd come back and they'd say, actually, everybody wants to know about open access or everybody wants to talk about, replication or something like this, or people want to know about research integrity.
As a matter of fact, today at Springer Nature, one of the we've released a couple of press releases today. One of them is on a study, a white paper that we just published that revealed that there are stunning gaps and discrepancies and disparities globally when it comes to research integrity training. So this is another area that there is an opportunity for us to cohesively come up with some standard practices and training and so on for early career researchers.
I want to give a little bit of insight into some of what we're offering right now and where we're seeing some results and some success. So we've got mentoring programs where we help connect Akers with researchers and editors for guidance. For example, we've got the Rising Scholars program, and I'm particularly proud of this initiative because we had recently one of the early career researcher participants come to us and say, I was so supported by this program.
My confidence increased and I was able to submit a paper, and I would never have done that before had it not been for this training. We've also had early career researchers go partner with their librarians on something. We had an ACR go talk to their librarian and then publish an article on their school paper about the work of librarians and how it was benefiting the research community.
So there's an opportunity here for publishers to help support, nurture, build a links between early career researchers and the library and actually the research office as well. Awards recognizing early career researchers is also another space in which we give the library something that they can garner some attention about while giving Akers an opportunity to shine.
So, for example, at Springer Nature, we've got our Sony award for women in tech. We've got an Estee Lauder award as well for women in science and all focused around Akers. And these are the sorts of initiatives that we need to Institute and we need to start promoting in order to better support this community. And I think, the saying it takes a village is really what this is about.
It's about partnership. Thank you to all the presenters. We've really just scratched the surface of what we could talk about when it comes to supporting early career researchers. So we wanted to give all of you a chance to talk about any kind of interesting initiatives that you may be doing or may be aware of.
And the way we're going to try to do that is to split up into groups. We're not going to do five groups, but we're going to do four groups because there are four corners of this room. So what I'm going to kindly ask all of you is based on where you're sitting to just try to go towards one of the corners of the room. And we want groups of maybe like 9 to 10 people if possible, and then we're going to come and serve as facilitators to a discussion about Akers.
And we're going to take notes on this Miro board that hopefully will open over here. And should be visible to all of you. And then the only other thing we're going to ask you is when you speak to just identify your role yourself as a librarian, researcher, publisher or other, if that's OK. All right.
Sorry oh, and I should mention you can also if it's typing this link might be a little onerous. We've already put the link in the community section of the SSP app. So if you go to the SSP app under news it says community in the bottom. On the community, you should be able to see a post from Bridget over there where you can access the link to the Miro board, but the facilitators will also bring their computers and we'll be able to take notes as we talk.
All right. Don't be shy. Let's go for it. Let's have a discussion about this. So try to migrate towards one of the corners of the room. Groups of about 8, 9 people. And we'll take it from there.
Segment:0 .
Welcome, everyone. I think we're going to go ahead and get started. While people are still strolling in. Thank you so much for choosing to come to our panel. We're very excited about this and have been thinking about some of the questions around early career researchers and how publishers and librarians can work together to support them for quite some time.
The five of us are quite an eclectic group, representing both publishing side, librarian side, as well as the researcher and practitioner side. But the more established researcher and practitioner side. One one voice that certainly missing, I'm realizing, is the actual early career researcher. Even though we have spoken to a lot of them. But before I go on, let me introduce myself and the panel.
I'm ANCA puska. I'm executive editor in International Studies on the book side at Springer Nature. And alongside me. You have Bridget Scholl, who's senior consultant at gold leaf. Doctor Jessica mbenga, who is one of our series editors for the human rights interventions book series at Springer Nature. We have a Saudi Arabian, yamakasi Yamasaki.
I'm very sorry. So who's the head of communications. The US communications at Springer Nature. And we also have Elliot Hibbeler, who is head librarian for scholarly and platforms at Boston College. Oh, actually, before I move on to the next slide, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the format of this presentation, because we designed it so that the second part of it is much more interactive.
So we'll try to keep our presentations themselves relatively short, and then we're going to try to break up into groups so that each and every one of you have a chance to speak and think about a number of questions that we're going to put up on the screen. And it mainly has to do with just how you think about early career researchers in your own work, within your own institutions, and where you feel there might be opportunities and gaps that we could fill up.
And we have a Miro board that we've set up. You should all be able to access the Miro board. I think only us will be able to actually take the notes. So you'll have a representative in each of the groups from the panelists taking notes, but you will be able to see those notes at any point, even after the panel. So who are early career researchers.
There we all recognize that they're a very unique group within the research ecosystem, and there's quite a lot of variation in terms of the expertise that they have, as well as in terms of the needs and the opportunities that are there for early career researchers, and it varies per researcher. It certainly also varies per institution. Some institutions dedicate more effort to supporting this particular group, while others are still in the process of starting to do that.
But I think overall, we all recognize that early career researchers are effectively our future. So it is in our interest to support them. And as you'll see, as I get to my last point, it's also in our interest to keep them within the research universe so that they don't leave at the end of their PhD or postdoc. So any work on early career researchers is an investment in the future.
They are the future of research. And supporting them, I think, is in our collective interest. They're also the majority workforce. According to research, achers tend to make up the majority of the research workforce, and they are the ones who have usually the most active research life with very unique expertise. Some of the literature that we've looked at suggests that they are really the ones that are much closer to the data than even some of the more experienced researchers.
More importantly, they are digital natives. They are a lot more adept with technologies, whether it's AI or whether it's understanding open science, open data. And they are much more interested in driving innovation in the research landscape. In most instances, you will likely find an ally in early career researchers when it comes to any form of innovation, partially because they're the more curious nature and the fact that they're not always set within existing structures and institutions.
Direct engagement. This is probably one of the main points that we also wanted to focus on. There's a lot of variation in terms of how institutions, particularly publishers and librarians, which is what we're here to discuss, how they actually engage with early career researchers. Oftentimes, a lot of the polls that Bridget will show us later on show the fact that early career researchers still receive information mainly via their supervisors.
They can certainly go on the internet and find a lot of additional information, but it is that's their trusted source. And unfortunately, a lot of those sources aren't necessarily up to date with the latest that is happening in the publishing world or even in terms of what the libraries are able to offer or beyond. So it's very important to establish that direct opportunities for that direct engagement, coordinated support.
What we're basically trying to argue via this panel is that we should be offering coordinating support, that there are natural alliances that can be formed in this case between publishers and librarians, but also beyond that in order to support early career researchers. SSP does a great job, and we've just heard during the award launch, it's supporting people at that early career stage.
And it's that kind of model. Following that kind of institutional model is just one way in which we can offer that coordinated support. And most importantly, we also want to be able to offer continued support. Post PhD research shows that about 80% or more of ecrs are moving away from academia post PhD. They're going into sometimes other research related fields or industry and ongoing support for these levers, so to speak, can be difficult because they're not usually our traditional market, particularly for academic publishers.
We're not often set up to deal with these PhD post PhDs that are leaving academia. So thinking about that group as well and paying attention to them is going to be quite important. I'm going to pass things on to Bridget now. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. So like ANCA said, early career researchers really are the future.
Not only are they the largest segment of researchers and academics, but their needs will really help drive change and innovation in our industry. So for the sake of the interactive session today, I thought I would just help the framing with a few of the salient points for us to consider as a group. So despite the perception that ecrs are interested in innovative or experimental publishing or scholarly communications.
The need to adhere to the current paths for career advancement are still pretty powerful motivators. So ACR is continue to aim for those traditional and well-regarded publishing outlets to be able to advance their careers as a result. But that being said, there's still a fairly strong sense from ACR that peer review needs improving. And while career advancement might pose some limits on how much willingness there is from ACR to publish outside of traditional outlets, that's not so much the case with discovery of research.
So there's definitely growing use of alternative sources. So like sci-hub or ResearchGate. And the main factors for this are convenience and/or lack of access. And when it comes to open access, it's widely recognized and understood that ACR is lack access to funding in the same kind of amounts and ease as more senior researchers. And there's already a lot that ACR need to get up to speed with when they're entering that publishing environment.
And so as those models have diversified, there's even kind of that much more to understand and to engage with. But at the same time, hopefully that will present new pathways to OA for those. Akers and while I is, of course touching on all aspects of scholarly communications across all career stages, it's worth noting that a majority of Akers see themselves using AI for things like conducting research, writing that research and manuscript preparation, as well as handling large information sets.
For Akers, though, in particular, there's a concern that I could exacerbate existing inequalities or disparities, and especially with concerns that researchers that have access to those paid for AI tools could then speed up their publication process or benefit in other ways. One of my sources for these slides is a project on Akers called the harbingers of change project if you're not already aware of it, I thought it might be of interest for this group.
This study investigated the scholarly communication, beliefs, and practices of Akers for a decade on a regular and continuing basis. It was an international collaboration across the US and the UK, Australia, China, France, Israel, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal and Spain. And this project found, quote unquote, cracks specific to Akers in the scholarly communication system. So those are reputational assessment, unethical and questionable practices, collaboration and networking and peer review.
So I won't talk through all of these in detail, but just some food for thought for the next portion of our session is things like reputational assessment could be more holistic and consider factors like transparency or openness. And another thought around the evolving role of digital platforms. Those offer both pros and cons for collaboration and networking for Akers, so there's still a need for those in-person opportunities.
But Akers have the most difficult time accessing the funding to attend those conferences or in-person events, and it would benefit the most from publishers and librarians helping facilitate those collaboration opportunities. And finally, just to seed our discussion a little bit further, here are some opportunities that jumped out to me based on both my research and what I've seen in my work. So there are opportunities for us to provide resources on how to drive the impact of Akers research, and this could include both what they can and can't do with their work online.
And like I just said a minute ago, to create opportunities for Akers to collaborate and/or network with other researchers or partner with organizations that do that. Just one example here is sense about science, and to design consciously to prevent AI from exacerbating existing disparities and inequalities, and to be able to provide information about how to harness AI responsibly and once again, what's not permitted, what they can't do, and to help build research capacity.
So this is an undeveloped opportunity. Still, when we think about the potential benefits of a transition to a more open access or O oriented publishing environment. So a few examples here could be supporting non HPC open access models, providing ACR specific resources on publishing and creating researcher services such as training. So I'll close with this quote from the harbingers project. Listen to Akers.
They know what they're saying, and in doing so, give them a voice. Thank you. OK can you see me. How did you do it. Yeah, that's. At my height. Discrimination yeah.
So thank you all. It's good to be here. And I am going to talk about my exposure, my direct engagement with Akers as somebody who's had maybe a not so traditional and a very traditional academic career. So the first two decades of my career were academic. I spent 10 years in the Netherlands, at the Netherlands Institute for human rights research, part of the law school at Utrecht University.
Traditional, well-funded, plenty of publications ending in the publication of my monograph with Penn Press. Subsequently, I had a decade in the US at a large public University in Cuny, teaching at a senior college in the Bronx at a Hispanic service serving Institute. So from research to teaching and then four or five years at Stanford University in administration, developing curriculum with faculty on human rights and community engaged learning.
So that was two decades in academia. 2019 I transitioned from academia into the global development humanitarian relief space as a human rights educator, a human rights advocate. And at the same time, I was introduced to my editor at Palgrave MacMillan at the time and launched co-launched with my co-editor, Irene Hadi at Leiden University.
We launched a series of human rights interventions. So transitioning out of academia, where do I encounter the EC, the ecr? And that question that has really been interesting for me. So in the development, the humanitarian space, I've been working on issues such as early childhood development in refugee settlements in Kenya or LGBTQ rights and faith based allies in grasping LGBTQ rights, ending violence against women and girls in Liberia and in Burundi and in those spaces.
Who do I bump into. I bump into x. And really, my role has been as an editor who is also a practitioner, has really been to provide the direct engagement and the accompaniment. How do you allow the ACR, who feel they're no longer an academic, to recognize their knowledge, products that they've accumulated in that practitioner space.
And that's the guidelines, the White papers, the policy research for the government of Nigeria and Rwanda and Burundi and Ethiopia to recognize these products as knowledge products and to accompany them in the process of adapting them for the theories. And I have one example from our series, which you can look at. And that's a publication by Doctor Jackie ogaga.
Doctor Jackie ogaga is a colleague that I worked with closely. When I worked in the faith based space. She was with World Vision. We worked together with Episcopal relief and development, American Jewish World Service, Islamic relief on various gender projects. I came to realize she was a doctor. She had a PhD from University of Bradford, and I also came to recognize that she had helped us recognize that she had a large portfolio of knowledge projects, and she had her dissertation that had been gathering dust, as many dissertations do, on gender, women, Kisii, Maasai women and peace building in Kenya.
And we were able to work together, work together, and find the resources and the time to help her develop the thesis and the work she had accumulated in a 20 year career and development into that book publication. So that's my contribution as somebody who is an academic, not an academic, and confronted every day with early career researchers who are advocates, who are activists, who are practitioners, and who have a body of knowledge and products that can be published.
Thank you. All right. Hi so I'm Elliot Hibbler. I'm the head of scholarly platforms and discovery services at Boston College libraries. Just to situate that Boston College, despite its name meaning college, is a research University classified R1 in the Carnegie system.
And we have graduate schools in management, law, nursing, social work, education and theology, but no Med school. So not quite the level of Johns Hopkins or somewhere like that. And when I brought this to me, it was really interesting because in the library we don't really classify, we don't think of our user groups as early career researchers. We're very role focused in our patron base. And so I was thinking, well, these users are really in a few different places.
So one is, of course, I'm going to go out of order. The first is new tenure track faculty. Faculty are, of course, very important at the University, and they get a lot of our attention. So for these early career researchers, we come to them with collection support. They start at the University and we ask, what do you need us to buy for you. We give support to your research assistants.
We do everything we can for them. And we also understand their goal, as we mentioned earlier, is to go from tenure track faculty to tenured faculty. And one way you do this is via your publication portfolio. So we are very cognizant of those needs and as supportive as we can be. Another group that we actually don't see much of in the library are postdocs. So here are my postdocs.
I'm really talking about people who work in various labs and centers on campus. This can definitely be your scientist working in a biology lab, but we also have centers that deal with things like education, definitely the humanities and social sciences part. And we have also found that the really main link to communicate with these people is through their supervisor, either who runs the lab or who runs the Center.
We, of course, provide support to them. They come to the library, we answer their questions. They have our credentials, they can use all of our resources, but we don't even have a direct way just to email all the postdocs on campus. It's just having to find piece by piece. Where do you get to these folks in the final place we support Akers is actually adjunct faculty. Now, of course, a lot of adjunct faculty are not Akers, but there is a subset of adjunct faculty who are recent PhDs.
They haven't found that tenure track position yet, and they are working at maybe two or three universities, I think more typically in humanities and social sciences, just trying to stay in the academic game. We of course support them with our collections as well. We support their teaching and they're primarily focused on teaching, but this is really trying to make me think about ways we can support people who are not tenure track faculty, but who want to get to that step.
So that's the ways I see that going. And to cheat a little about ways to the idea phase that we're going to be talking about, it really is about communication. We'll have different events for faculty, adjunct faculty. And then maybe an event for PhD students that there's not much difference on some levels between a first year postdoc and a PhD student in finishing their dissertation.
They both have the same publishing needs, maybe the same publishing knowledge, and we need to think about how we can bring these different groups together that have common interest in their careers. While they don't look the same to us when we're dividing up our I guess it's kind of a business conference when we're looking at our market segmentation for library users. How do we come across these different sections. So just a preview of things we'll be talking about in a minute as a group, but just ways to think about how we can support these people in the library.
And so now I'm going to pass it on to Zoe to talk a little more about this group. Hi, I'm SEO Yamasaki, head of communications for the United States for Springer Nature. So if we want to figure out what exactly it is that early career researchers need as far as support, they're probably the right people to ask.
And so I really like this study actually from Springer Nature on nature master from a nature master classes and this nature Research Academy survey, because when we asked Akers which of the following skills they felt they would benefit from training in, there were some interesting insights that arose. So as you can see here, of course peer review, leadership, some of the expected areas there.
But then I also see something very interesting. We see that lots of Akers think that they need some training around communicating their research to the public. As a matter of fact, in this and other studies, we've seen that 97% of researchers who say the right skills are essential also think that soft skills, 81% of them soft skills like communication and networking and so on are crucial for their visibility and collaboration.
And 81% in this study found it difficult to explain their work to non-scientific audiences. So at a time during which science is facing some headwinds, it's more important than ever that early career researchers are able to explain why it is what they're doing is important, and there's an opportunity here for libraries in partnership with publishers to help this community.
So I'm going to move on. So these are the areas that we think are relevant. And I should preface some of this by saying that at Springer Nature, I lead our early career researcher program, which is a means of unifying the various initiatives that we've got going on around the company globally to support early career researchers, so that there really is a targeted programmatic effort at this group libraries are able to help us with this skill development where acres are concerned.
So science communication, networking and collaboration, academic writing. These areas are spaces in which publishers are able to provide material, provide information, so we led as part of the early career researcher program, some pilot workshops in partnership with librarians last year, the year prior. And one really interesting thing that would happen is you'd go to the library and you'd say, what do you think.
Your group of Akers and whether it's the chemistry department or whatever, what do you think they'd be interested in. And this was an opportunity for librarians to do just what Elliott said earlier and go find these people and figure out those paths. And this also helped them gain more visibility with the research office, which we heard sometimes weren't as aware of the breadth and depth of the work it is that librarians are doing.
And so there really was this kind of nurturing of connections and relationships that we started to find ourselves doing as part of this effort. And then they'd come back and they'd say, actually, everybody wants to know about open access or everybody wants to talk about, replication or something like this, or people want to know about research integrity.
As a matter of fact, today at Springer Nature, one of the we've released a couple of press releases today. One of them is on a study, a white paper that we just published that revealed that there are stunning gaps and discrepancies and disparities globally when it comes to research integrity training. So this is another area that there is an opportunity for us to cohesively come up with some standard practices and training and so on for early career researchers.
I want to give a little bit of insight into some of what we're offering right now and where we're seeing some results and some success. So we've got mentoring programs where we help connect Akers with researchers and editors for guidance. For example, we've got the Rising Scholars program, and I'm particularly proud of this initiative because we had recently one of the early career researcher participants come to us and say, I was so supported by this program.
My confidence increased and I was able to submit a paper, and I would never have done that before had it not been for this training. We've also had early career researchers go partner with their librarians on something. We had an ACR go talk to their librarian and then publish an article on their school paper about the work of librarians and how it was benefiting the research community.
So there's an opportunity here for publishers to help support, nurture, build a links between early career researchers and the library and actually the research office as well. Awards recognizing early career researchers is also another space in which we give the library something that they can garner some attention about while giving Akers an opportunity to shine.
So, for example, at Springer Nature, we've got our Sony award for women in tech. We've got an Estee Lauder award as well for women in science and all focused around Akers. And these are the sorts of initiatives that we need to Institute and we need to start promoting in order to better support this community. And I think, the saying it takes a village is really what this is about.
It's about partnership. Thank you to all the presenters. We've really just scratched the surface of what we could talk about when it comes to supporting early career researchers. So we wanted to give all of you a chance to talk about any kind of interesting initiatives that you may be doing or may be aware of.
And the way we're going to try to do that is to split up into groups. We're not going to do five groups, but we're going to do four groups because there are four corners of this room. So what I'm going to kindly ask all of you is based on where you're sitting to just try to go towards one of the corners of the room. And we want groups of maybe like 9 to 10 people if possible, and then we're going to come and serve as facilitators to a discussion about Akers.
And we're going to take notes on this Miro board that hopefully will open over here. And should be visible to all of you. And then the only other thing we're going to ask you is when you speak to just identify your role yourself as a librarian, researcher, publisher or other, if that's OK. All right.
Sorry oh, and I should mention you can also if it's typing this link might be a little onerous. We've already put the link in the community section of the SSP app. So if you go to the SSP app under news it says community in the bottom. On the community, you should be able to see a post from Bridget over there where you can access the link to the Miro board, but the facilitators will also bring their computers and we'll be able to take notes as we talk.
All right. Don't be shy. Let's go for it. Let's have a discussion about this. So try to migrate towards one of the corners of the room. Groups of about 8, 9 people. And we'll take it from there.
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