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Retrogressing Research and Limiting Diversity: The Impact of the Pandemic on Scholarly Publishing's Inequities
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Retrogressing Research and Limiting Diversity: The Impact of the Pandemic on Scholarly Publishing's Inequities
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Segment:0 .
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Some of them.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: That's great.
WILLIE E. MAY: Yeah, I think so overall. I was-- I have a few nuances since I sent mine in. So I'll send you the following day also.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Perfect. We'll give folks a few seconds to funnel in here before we get started. All right, let's get started. Welcome, everyone.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: We are so glad to have you joining us for today's session on Retrogressing Research and Limiting Diversity: The Pandemic's Impact on Scholarly Publishing Inequities. The session is being moderated by Dr. Chhavi Chauhan and myself. And we have four wonderful panelists joining us today. I'd like to know a few housekeeping items before we get started.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: So as you can see the session is in webinar format. So participants will be muted. The session is being recorded. And I believe there's a plan to have the recording available on the SSP website later this week, through November I believe. We'll ask that you drop any questions for the panelists in the chat box on the Pathable site. We'll be monitoring that chat box for any questions that come through.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I'll also note that Dr. Chhavi Chauhan will be live tweeting our session. So if you'd like to follow along with her tweets feel free to follow her. I think she will drop her Twitter handle on the chat on Pathable. And with that, I'd like to introduce Dr. Chhavi as my wonderful, co-organizer and co-moderator for the session.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Chhavi is the Director for Scientific Outreach at the American Society for Investigative Pathology. And she's the director of the CMU Program at the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. She is one of the leaders of the Women in AI Ethics collectives. And she's an expert at the AI Policy Exchange. She's a biomedical researcher and expert scholarly communicator. And a sought after mentor in the fields of scientific research, scholarly publishing and AI Ethics especially for women and minorities.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: She's a thought leader, a renowned international speaker and a strong advocate for equitable and accessible health care. She sits at the intersection of scientific research, scholarly communications and AI ethics in health care. Her vision is to provide equitable, personalized health care to all beyond geographies and despite socioeconomic disparities. I'm also personally pleased to note that Chhavi has recently been appointed as our newest co-chair for SSP's own Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And we are so lucky to have her leading that team. And with that, I will hand it over to Chhavi.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Well, thank you so much Steph. That was such a kind introduction. And for the record, it is my pleasure and honor to have collaborated with Steph on this exciting and timely session. For those of you who do not know yet, my esteemed partner, Stephanie Pollock, is Associate Publisher, Community Initiatives of the American Psychological Association. There she drives strategy and publishing partner engagement for the APA Journal Program And serves as the Journal's Program lead for equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Our speaker, Lois, joins me to talk about some of these during the session and I'm excited about that. The ten years of experience in scholarly publishing, Steph is committed to improving equity in both the field of psychology and in scholarly publishing industry. She is a 2016 graduate of the Master in Professional Studies and Publishing program, at the George Washington University. A member of the Association for Women in Psychology. And has served on SSP's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee since 2018.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Welcome Steph. And please take it away from here.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you so much Chhavi. So a little bit about our structure today, we're going to first hear a few short presentations from three of our wonderful panelists. And our hope is that this will set the stage for a structured discussion that we'll have in the latter half of the session. We're also definitely hoping to leave some time for audience Q&A. So please we encourage you to participate heavily. Drop your questions and comments in the chat on Pathable throughout.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And with that, we can get started. So our first speaker is Dr. Willie May. While he pulls up his slides I'll be pleased to introduce him and share a little bit more about him. So Dr. May is the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Morgan State University. Prior to Morgan, Dr. May served as the Director of Major Research and Training Initiatives for the College of Computer, Mathematical and the Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Where he developed new relationships and expanded existing partnerships with corporations, foundations, and government agencies. And assisted the college in obtaining additional support for graduate student education, training and mentoring. Dr. May has also served in several high profile positions prior to these roles. Including as the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology. He has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park. And his work has been published in more than 90 peer reviewed publications. And he's given more than 300 invited lectures at conferences and symposia around the world. He's also been recognized by CandEN News magazine as the federal government's top chemist.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And as Laboratory Director of the Year by the Federal Laboratory Consortium. We're so happy to have him here today. So take it away Dr. May.
WILLIE E. MAY: Well, good afternoon. And thanks so much for that very gracious introduction. I'd like to spend a few moments talking about the impact of the pandemic on scholarly publications of Morgan State University. Which is indicative of many HBCUs, I think. I start by saying that there are over 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the United States.
WILLIE E. MAY: Slightly more than 260 of those are called research universities. And about half of those are top tier research institutions are called R1 by the Carnegie Institution. And the latter half of those are R2 universities. And Morgan falls into the R2 universities. As do 11 other HBCUs. And I think the talk that I'm going to give, on behalf of Morgan State University, is probably indicative of many of those other R2 HBCUs.
WILLIE E. MAY: Although I'm clearly speaking for Willie May and for Morgan State University and not the other, HBCUs. A bit about Morgan State University. Morgan was founded in 1867. And like all other HBCUs, well, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, they were founded to provide education to their recently emancipated slaves.
WILLIE E. MAY: So they did not have a research agenda. They were finishing school, instructional schools. As I just said now, have earned the classification of an R2 research university. One of about 130 of those in the country. And like I said, 11 or 12 of those are HBCUs. In 2017 we were given the designation by our state legislature, as Maryland's Pre-eminent Urban Public Research University.
WILLIE E. MAY: We have around, approaching 8,000 students. Fairly evenly divided by gender. 56% men and 44% women. About 17 of the 7,800 students we have are graduate students. And we have-- we offer programs-- we offer 46 BS degrees, 34 master's category and we offer PhDs in 18 areas as of now.
WILLIE E. MAY: And we have at least about four more that were before our State Education Commission for approval. That's essentially who we are and where are we going? And you see a snapshot of our 10-year plan. And you see our four goals. I want read them all to you. But we-- I'll say something about goal two and goal three. We, as our aspirational goal to become an R1 University.
WILLIE E. MAY: Over the next 10 years. And in doing that, we plan to serve as a Premiere Anchor Institution for Urban Communities in general. And Baltimore City in specific. Now, we have two other R1 universities in the state of Maryland. University of Maryland, College Park and Johns Hopkins University. We are not going to become R1 by trying to mimic them.
WILLIE E. MAY: We plan to direct a disproportionate amount of our research, to addressing the issues of urban communities like we find in Baltimore. So we see that as our sweet spot, if you will. During COVID, we've conducted laboratory-based research. In fact, we only had our laboratories shut down for about two months. We began to open them as early as late last July.
WILLIE E. MAY: And we felt we had to do that if we were going to continue in our pursuit for being a top flight research university. Because with granting agencies once you turn that water off, it's not as easy to turn that faucet on. And we developed some strong protocols. And I'm not showing this information I should put it in the slide deck. But we have had a institute, a testing program for our faculty, staff and the students.
WILLIE E. MAY: That where we, had typically, a few test percent, positivity rate. Each week that we tested. And we tested between our staff, depending on how often they were on campus. Between once and three times per week. So that was very-- we thought that was very, very effective. And kept our roughly 1,000 students who were on campus during this past year, safe and healthy.
WILLIE E. MAY: We had a number of our faculty who got involved in public outreach and educational activities through local radio stations and writing scholarly papers. To keep our community abreast in what was going on with the vaccination. Try to avoid, to prevent vaccine hesitancy. And basically, educate them on how vaccines were actually made in general. So we had a number of seminars on that.
WILLIE E. MAY: And more recently, I think I've talked about the testing program, we actually, we are a vaccination site for the community. So we are testing site for our faculty, staff and students. We're a vaccination site for the community in general. Well, when we talk about publishing you don't-- to publish research results you have to have funds to do the research.
WILLIE E. MAY: And historically I said, HBCUs were teaching institutions. And our research universities, state research universities really exploded in the early 1960s. After these Russians light Sputnik. Our response to that was to put lots of money into scientific research. And besides Howard University, the HBCUs didn't get much of this.
WILLIE E. MAY: Because again we were teaching universities and structured universities, not research universities. And you can see that if you look over the past 10 years that's been a big discrepancy. Universities in general, federal funding for grants has gone up 20%. For HBCUs they've gone down 20%. So that's the situation that we find ourselves in. But we still punch above our weight.
WILLIE E. MAY: HBCUs make up less than 5% of all US colleges and universities. Yet we graduate, provide bachelor's degrees for a quarter of the African-Americans to get STEM degrees in our country. So here, just a snapshot that gives you an indication of what things look like at Morgan State University. I'm using our academic year, fiscal year of '17 '18 and '19 as base years.
WILLIE E. MAY: The first year of COVID at least a half academic year, FY20. You can see that we had an increase, in the number of peer reviewed journals. For FY21, we went up almost 30%. So I attribute this to the fact that our faculty had more time to actually focus on writing these things up. They couldn't go in to the lab. Well, they couldn't go in to the campus.
WILLIE E. MAY: So they saved the commute time. And I think people were just tired of being locked up, to be honest with you. So we found that our faculty in terms of peer reviewed journals, were more productive during this period. Conference proceedings as you might imagine went down because we weren't going to conferences. Book chapters went up, both years.
WILLIE E. MAY: Papers presented at conferences and symposia went down. Oh, grants that we received for conducting sponsored research, went up almost 10%, in 2020. And this year, went up about 12%. So basically, because we weren't going into campus it didn't mean that we weren't productive in scholarly activity, we weren't involved in scholarly activities.
WILLIE E. MAY: And this just shows that the grants, these were the grants we submitted. You can see, roughly 110 million, $100 million, slightly over $100 million, over the past three years. This year, it went up to almost 150 million, in grant proposals submitted. Now, they haven't been awarded yet but those were just our submissions.
WILLIE E. MAY: This is our publication for peer reviewed publications. You can see the breakdown between men and women. In 2021, our almost one peer review publication per faculty. If we were to look at this for our science and technology faculty, this is the entire staff, the entire faculty. Almost 1 to 1, for a peer reviewed published article.
WILLIE E. MAY: Almost 0.6 for women. Well, we know that in our society women traditionally have the role for providing much of the child care. And since children were at home a lot of this year, a lot more of that burden probably felt on our female faculty members. So the productivity of men went up quite a bit during this period.
WILLIE E. MAY: And women just slightly reduce past the norm. And the same for-- this is 4 book chapters. Didn't really see any affect there at all. So with that, I'll stop. And thank you for indulging me for going slightly over my time I'm sure.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: That's absolutely fine really. Those were some outstanding findings. And I shared some of the data that you presented today on Twitter. And we're getting a lot of responses. But I do understand that we have to wait for the attendee questions, as Steph mentioned earlier. We'll go through the presentations first. Next we have with us, Lois Jones. She's Peer Review Manager for the Journals Department of the American Psychological Association.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: There she co-manages the Peer Review Program. Which includes, 90 journals and 20 peer review coordinators. Lois is focused on ensuring a transparent and ethical peer review process for authors. While providing reviewers and editors, the exceptional support they need in the constantly changing landscape of scholarly publishing. She's 2014 graduate of the Master of Professional Studies in Publishing Program at the George Washington University.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: And of 2017, SSP Early Career Fellow. Currently, Lois serves on the inaugural editorial board, for GWU's Journal of Ethics in Publishing. I would like to add that I have had the privilege of connecting with Lois in the past. And I'm amazed by her passion and her drive. And it would not be an understatement to say, that she is one of my most favorite DNI. Or should I say, EBNI expert.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Welcome Lois.
LOIS JONES: Thank you. That's very nice to hear. So yeah, I'm talking about the Impact of COVID-19 on Author and Reviewer Behaviors by Gender. I will give the specific caveat that this is for our titles only. I know it's very different across some of the fields. Quick background on the American Psychological Association is, you might know it for a Publication Manual. We're also a membership organization.
LOIS JONES: And a publisher obviously. We have more than 90 psychology journals. We have a heavy focus on increasing our EDI efforts just across the board, throughout the whole Association. I do want to say. When we're talking about diversity, we're including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, country of origin and disability status.
LOIS JONES: Unfortunately for the specific data set it is limited only to gender. Hopefully we'll have more in the future though. So when COVID first hit, we did start seeing the concerns about who was going to be left behind in research and in publishing. At first it was just a general kind of discussion and concern. But then our editors started asking us that this is something we could actually monitor and track through our submission system.
LOIS JONES: So given that this last year can have lasting consequences and people's careers we thought that it was actually very important to try and track what's happening real time. One of the specific questions we had was that women were dropping out of the peer review and authorship activities at higher rates than men. Potentially due to their caregiving responsibilities. So some kind of notes up front on the data. This is based on authorship data as submitted to Editorial Manager during January to October of 2019.
LOIS JONES: And in the same period in 2020 so we're comparing the same time periods. During 2020 we didn't have a reliable way to collect meaningful demographics information in our submission system. That's changing soon. That's great. Very excited to see that update. So the gender had to be assigned by an algorithm, which is obviously limited by the binary view of gender as male or female.
LOIS JONES: And then if the algorithm couldn't make a good guess on it, it was going-- the person is listed as unidentifiable or unidentified. So as more people are identifying as non-binary or who have non-traditional gender identities, we do find that it's more appropriate to self report data. Additionally, the gender-guesser library that we used, has difficulty guessing gender on non-European names.
LOIS JONES: Which is a clear issue, especially as we've been trying to do more and more to increase international authorship. So we did have a very lengthy discussion internally about the appropriateness of using an algorithm. However, in the interest of progress versus perfection, which I've heard talk about in a couple of different sessions so far this year, we did want to move forward with the hope that the patterns would still be relevant across our journals.
LOIS JONES: In the future, like I said, we will be relying on more self-report data. That will hopefully be more representative and appropriate, and including race and ethnicity. Excuse me. So since intersectionality is so key in these discussions, it is unfortunate that's missing from this data set. So I will say that up front. But when we started to look at it, the specific questions that we were looking at were, were women less likely to be authors last year than in 2019.
LOIS JONES: And were they less likely to accept review invitations. Interestingly, we haven't seen the impact that we've heard from other publishers. I think my big caveat on that is we haven't seen it yet. There was no significant difference between the number of authors nor a number of reviewers. Early assessment does show that more editorial decisions were made by people who were designated as kind of female names by the algorithm.
LOIS JONES: So by women we're assuming. But we're not actually clear yet if that's a result of them taking on a larger portion of the extra submissions we received last year. Or if it's just due to the fact that a lot of our editors in 2019, very specifically brought in more women editors. And have been trying to increase the gender diversity across journals.
LOIS JONES: So it could just be, now we have more women as associate editors and as main editors. So we kind of delve into that a bit more. But so, kind of good news. When we pulled the data we did still have over 16% of the 2020 submissions in that time period that didn't have a final decision. So the numbers could change. Based on the submissions that have completed the full editorial process.
LOIS JONES: The rates are very similar across years. So for the acceptances and rejection rates, it's mostly, level kind of, obviously there's an increase in rejections and an increase in acceptances this year for 2020. Because there were so many more submissions. But we're not seeing differences between the genders. The unidentifiable names however could slightly change those results, which is why it's so important to get stronger data.
LOIS JONES: So big questions for the future. Women are still talking about the impact anecdotally. We hear it a lot. It's a very important conversation. So where is that impact on the data? Are we not looking at the right data? Are we looking at the data too soon? So for example are we going to see fewer new research studies that were started this last year by women?
LOIS JONES: Or are they dropping to less senior roles in the authorship? Because we did look at all of the authors. And we do have-- we are able to see-- if they were first author, last author, corresponding author, or just like any author in there. And with the paper submitted last year potentially based on research done in previous years. And so we also didn't do an analysis on the type of articles.
LOIS JONES: We had a lot of commentaries last year. There were some rapid reviews special issues. So that could-- there could be some differences in there. But a major focus for the future should be on collecting more self-report data. And looking at it more regularly. In addition to gender identity, like I said, we also think it's very important to get race and ethnicity in there.
LOIS JONES: As well as other demographics information. So overall, this is a first step. But we learned a lot about the process in general. And the pitfalls and the places where we need to get advice from other people or other organizations. So hopefully it will lead us to paying attention to the right things so that if we are going to see those impacts in the future, we're watching it and intervening and helping people out there.
LOIS JONES: Thank you.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you so much Lois for sharing that research. I think that's going to be a great contribution to our discussion in a bit. Lastly but certainly not least, we're going to hear from Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto. Dr. Sugimoto is a professor of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. She investigates the ways in which knowledge is produced, disseminated and rewarded. With a particular interest in issues of diversity and inclusion.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences. And the Sloan Foundation. She's actively involved in teaching and service. And she's been recognized in these areas with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award. And the Bicentennial Award. She's also currently serving as the President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informatics.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: She has an undergraduate degree in Music Performance. And Ms. in Library Science and a PhD in Information and library Science. All from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Take it away Cassidy.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Thank you so much Steph. And Chhavi made me promise to keep this to five minutes. And only focus on the key takeaways. So I'll just start here and say, the key takeaways that gender disparities existed before the pandemic. The pandemic made manifest to many of the inequities that were already in the system and magnified it. And it matters.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So I'll try to go over that with a few key data points in the next five minutes. But I hope that people will ask questions and come back together afterwards if you have any questions about these slides. So one is just the extent of gender disparities across the world. So what we're seeing here is female to male, or I should say women to men productivity by country from 2008 to 2017.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So the darker blue the country it is, the more production we have from authors who are quoted. In the same way Lois talked about algorithmically, as men and those from women. As you can see it's a very blue world. With men largely outnumbering women in terms of their authorship on scholarly publications. Now there's also differences in the types of labor that are conducted in order to become considered on the paper.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So if we break down something-- break down those authorship into a credit taxonomy. Looking at the roles and the labors that we're done in producing that authorship, we see very different things. Men are more likely to be associated with supervision, funding, resources, conceptualization, software. The editing and the reviewing, the project administration and validation.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Whereas women, are doing the methods, the visualization, all the analysis. Writing the full draft, data curation and investigation. So that presents a very different kind of picture when we think about the underrepresentation of women as authors. But their overemphasis and their overrepresentation in the core aspects of scientific discovery and work. So women as the hands of scientific labor.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: But not necessarily reaping the rewards of that labor. Now all of that matters when we think about retention and attrition in science. Where women fall on the bylines with paper as first or last as Lois talked about, become very dominant off the rolls. And what we see is that men are disproportionately likely to be in some of those key authorship roles very early in their career, much more likely than women.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And being in one of those key roles is a huge predictor of whether you stay in the scientific workforce. So when we're not involving women in those leadership positions during their graduate studies, we are less likely to keep them in the scientific system as well. And data that we have looked at from NCSCS. Which gives us race and ethnicity data says that the same thing is happening with minoritized individuals.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: They are less likely to receive a research assistantship, less likely to be on publications and less likely to be in some of those roles, that would lead them into a career path. So this becomes very important when we start looking at data for the pandemic. Equally important to what we see happening within science, we have to look at what happens within society. And Doctor May mentioned this in his presentations as well.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: The disproportionate labor that women put in domestic and care responsibilities. Whether it's child care, elder care or other family responsibilities. So in a survey that we conducted before the pandemic, we asked men and women to identify as either lead parents, dual parents those with shared equally shared parenting roles and those of satellite. Now may not be surprising to you that more female scholars identified as lead parents and more male scholars identified as satellite parents.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: But what was so shocking to us was, that equal proportion said that they were shared parents. And that was the majority of respondents. Of both male and female scholars saying we share parenting equally. But I'd love to show you all the results but I'll show you one of us breaking that down. So we asked them what time of day they were engaged in parenting and what kinds of activities they did.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So we asked these huge list of activities. Who is primarily responsible for play dates, birthday parties, snack, weekday shopping, bedtime stories? And women were disproportionately likely to perform all of the tasks. Regardless of whether they were identified as lead, dual or satellite parent. Save one, coaching sporting events. That was a very male parent kind of activity.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So what this suggests to us is that even when you're conceptualizing in a shared parenting relationship, there is unequal burden even within those spaces. That are disproportionately going to hit women. And then when manifestation that happens during the pandemic, shows us the effect of that exogenous shock on the academic workforce. Now again in pre-pandemic mode, we see that this has an effect on their productivity.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Those who are more engaged with parenting from the self-report data, are less productive than their peers who are in less engaged parenting roles. Now this affects both men and women. Anyone who has increased engagement with our children shows decreased productivity. But the gap is wider for women. Women are disproportionately harmed by parenting in terms of a productivity loss.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So of course it is no surprise that when the pandemic hit, we saw particularly in the submissions of preprint, those sort of early indicators of scientific activity, a decline in women. But a decline in women primarily in those first authorship roles. So while we saw women who were still staying on the authorship line they were being moved to middle authorship. Suggesting that they might have been on the scientific teams before.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: They had to take a step back in order to deal with care responsibilities. And so they were retained on the byline but not retained in those dominant positions. Which has implications for their career trajectories. Now also worrisome, is that they were disproportionately left out of COVID-related topics. Which shows an inability to sort of pivot to those fast moving topics.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And that they weren't engaged in the design of new research during the pandemic. Now you may say, well, why does this matter? Right, science is neutral. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female or Black or White. Right, a pipette is a pipette, it shouldn't really matter. What we see as it has huge implications on the design of research itself.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So what you're seeing here was a study we did from PubMed. Looking at biomedical research, public health research, and clinical medicine. To see whether there were disproportionate emphasis on the study populations themselves. So in obstetrics and gynecology, you study women, more than you study men, right. Urology studies men more than women, that makes sense. But we saw a huge difference in psychiatry, and embryology, and genetics.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: In terms of the male and female representation of the populations. Either the sex of the cell, the mammal population that was used. Or in public health research, the human populations that were used. So this has huge effects. It changes what we know about men and women within these topics.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And when we looked at this by authorship, we found that women were significantly more likely to take sex into an account, when they were doing their studies. And significantly more likely to study women. So this homophily bias comes in. The more women you have in the biomedical workforce the more we know about the female body. And given that it's 50% of the population and 100% of the birthing population, that seems fairly important.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Now a recent study has also been looking at this as it goes across topic spaces. Both with looking at feminization, the degree of women in a particular discipline. And then the racial group proportion. Using US census data we're able to algorithmically derive whether an individual is likely to be associated with Black, Hispanic, White or Asian population. And we see that there is a topical disparity.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: With the Black scholars more likely to study issues related to African-Americans, racial disparities. For our Hispanic populations, more likely to look at topics around Latinos, racial disparities in English and Spanish issues within the area of health. And so again this reinforces the idea that it is not just a social justice issue, but really changing the composition of the scientific workforce changes what we know.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And what topics are valued and studied. So the removal of some populations during this pandemic matters for science. Thank you.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Well, thank you so much Dr. Sugimoto. That was terrific. And you're sitting on a data mine. And it was heartbreaking for me to ask you to cut back on your slides. But I know you're such an eloquent speaker that you'll still deliver. And thank you so much for that. We're getting a lot of comments from the attendees here. But before we move on to that, I would love to introduce our last speaker Dr.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Romero-Olivares She's not presenting any slides. But she brings in the researcher perspective. To give a little background, Dr. Romero-Olivares is a soil microbiologist. Who works at the Intersection of Ecosystem, Ecology and Evolution. She's interested in understanding how microbes respond, and adapt to environmental stress. If we only knew how to do that, huh?
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Our overall research goal is to better understand and plan for ecosystem scale effects of global climate change. She's originally from Mexico. And received her PhD from the University of California Irvine. Where she investigated the effects of global warming on the soil microbial communities of Boreal forest in Alaska. She then did her post at the University of New Hampshire, where she was a diversity and innovation scholar.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Studying the mission of microbial volatiles in soils experiencing long term warming and nitrogen pollution at Harvard Forest. She's now an Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University. Where she's exploring microbial communities of drylands of the Southwest of the USA. Welcome Doctor Romero-Olivares. With your outstanding background, I think can talk about--
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Thank you.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Yeah, we're so glad to have you here. We can just talk about so many topics. And at length I guess. But in the interest of time and for the sake of this panel, I would like to welcome you to share your thoughts on the effect of the ongoing pandemic, in retrogressing research and limiting diversity. Especially in scholarly publishing space.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Yeah, of course. I started my position as an assistant professor at New Mexico State in August of 2020. So not the best time to start up a lab. And buy things. I ordered a bunch of things to populate my lab. There's some of those things that I haven't gotten just yet. Because they're back ordered. There's a lot of-- just the trophic chain of things have been completely disrupted because of the pandemic.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: And it's not only affecting those of us who started our lab, last year or this year. But it's also affecting a lot of labs that had been running for a few years or for many years. There's just basic things that we haven't been able to get. Basic consumables that you need for all sorts of research. And it's been really disruptive. And I do like to point out that that is my situation here in the US, one of the most privileged countries in the world.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: I have a lot of colleagues in Mexico and other places in Latin America. And things there are far worse. Things usually take longer to arrive over there. So with the pandemic right now it's just unmeasurable, how much time is being lost because things are back-ordered. Borders are closed. And it's just been a huge disruption to research in general.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Which is going to translate to less productivity in terms of manuscripts and research results just in general.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I think that's fascinating to hear, Adriana. Thank you so much for sharing that. And hearing you talk about even the almost baseline necessities for running your lab not even being available, obviously in the middle of the pandemic. But even still now it's clear that you're still grappling with some of the challenges of trying to do your work in the middle of coming out of a pandemic. And I think that speaks to something Lois said earlier where she was saying, even if we're not seeing results from the data yet it's clear that these disparities are continuing, right, that they're not going away.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And I was wondering if you could speak a bit to what that means for you as a researcher, for your career, for your approach to building out your contribution to the science. What that means for you.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Yeah, of course. It's very stressful for me. I'm in a timeline. I am on a tenure track position. Meaning that in four years I need to go through this very extensive review of my productivity, and my intellectual contribution to the sciences. And only if a committee inside the University and outside the University deems that my work was meaningful enough and that I was productive enough, then I'm going to get tenure.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Meaning that I'm going to stay in this University indefinitely. So in the tenure track it's not stopping because of the pandemic. So for me it's really stressful. Trying to get things going. And not being able to because there's disruptions that I have no control over. So a lot of those of us assistant professors were going through this very stressful times.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: I'm just trying to remain productive in the middle of this whole situation aside from the fact that if you're a caregiver, if you're a woman, if you are a person of color and so on. So those things add up. So it is an extremely stressful time for all of us. In addition, there's been like cuts to science budgets. I am an ecologist. So maybe those people who are studying like COVID for example, they have a lot of research funds for them to look into that.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But for those of us doing other types of scientific research, . We've also seen cuts to scientific budget there's been massive University cuts because drops of enrollment and so on. And all of those things add up. For example, in my University we had to, they had to cut a lot of lecture positions and other administrative positions. And all of that means-- that I mean those administrative jobs and those classes they need to happen still.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But now all of those administrative burdens and all of those extra teaching hours fall mostly on us faculty. So it's a time of a lot of stress because we have to be very productive with research. But then all of a sudden, we have to do a lot of administrative tasks. That we didn't have to do before. We have to teach more hours.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: So just overall it's really stressful.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: That sounds incredibly stressful. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I hear this and obviously my first thought is, where do you get the support that you need to address some of these stressors? Obviously this is something that you can't take on, on your own and you shouldn't have to take on your own. What are-- are there sort of aspects within your university that are helping to try to mitigate some of this? Is everyone just sort of in a sink or swim environment?
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Or they're anything in between?
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Yeah I think that, so in some cases tenure extensions have been granted. Especially for people that were going for tenure last year. They provided like a one year extension. I believe, I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that I am eligible for a one year extension as well. But, the consequences of the pandemic we're not going to make up for those in just a year. So I haven't decided yet if I'm going to take about one year tenure extension.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But it is a possibility. Other than that, I mean, there's not a lot of support system, especially within the University. Everyone in the University struggling, especially those that lost their jobs. The administration is just looking to save money I guess. So they're not really investing a lot on support systems, especially not for faculty. There are some resources for students but I wouldn't say there are for faculty.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: And I mean, no, it's pretty much we're on our own. I mean I'm relying a lot on some of my colleagues. I'm part of a network called Woman of Color in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. And it's mostly other scientist in my area. We have like a slack channel. For faculty and I mean we vent there, we commiserate. But that's pretty much it. I rely a lot on my husband.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: He's also a professor. And he's just been very helpful just in anything that I need. But I wouldn't say that there's like a structure system of support.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Wow. And we are getting a lot more questions for you Adriana. But I want to give opportunity to the other speakers as well. And also raise a concern that I heard yesterday, in one of the presentations. And I jumped at the opportunity at the time. They were talking about a platform of identifying funding sources, where the funding is going to which subjects. To be able to proactively create special journals or special issues to be able to publish that research which is getting funded.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: But here we are on the other end where the people are not getting funding. They're already struggling to perform their research. So how can we, as a scholarly publishing community, incentivize or provide any incentives in terms of publication to those people who are already struggling to do research? Forget about publishing that research in the future. And this is a little offtrack.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: What people want to know, from Cassidy and Adriana, what think about PNT committees if they're going to be needing to recognize the disproportionate impact of women during review period. And you too really. Like what should we do about it.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: That's a great question. I'll answer first the PNT question and then go back to the scholarly publishing one. So I mean, across the board most institutions took tenure extensions. And I actually disagree with tenure extensions. I think it increases your time of vulnerability. It keeps populations in precarious positions longer than necessary. I think that if you do that if you move with a tenure extension what I would like to see is that the institution also does salary compensation at the other end of that.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So if someone extends for a year and then gets tenure, I would like to see them back paid for the year of salary loss in extending that tenure. They didn't extend for personal reason, they extended for because an exogenous shock hit the system. It is not their fault. They should not have to bear the financial consequences of that extension. But I also think that, extensions or not, we have to retrain our PNT committees.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: If we have the same expectations going in and an extension just means they have to produce one more year of work. It doesn't actually free them up from that lost year of productivity. And so, I think that we need to be very careful about using that as sort of a blanket commitment to our faculty. I think it needs to come with other incentives.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Adriana, I don't know if you're going to say something on that. And then I have some publishing ideas. [LAUGHS]
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: I don't have much to say about it. I think that the promotion and tenure system needs some sort of renewal. It's just not working the way that-- when it was set up, it was set up for mostly White man that had a housewife at home taking care of everything. That is not the case anymore in the system. It doesn't work for quote unquote, "like modern assistant assistants." I don't have much to say other than that.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES:
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: I'd love to go back to what are interesting things that SPP and other publishers could do? And so Indiana I was so impressed with them. The BPR's office really said, OK, we see that this is going to take a hit in research. How do we deal with the research issues? And so they asked for short term, mid-term and long term solution. So in the short term we did a gender equity fund. And we provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in these very small grants, to anyone who applied.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: It wasn't limited by gender but it was predominantly women who applied, predominantly assistant professors who applied. And we put in options for caregiving subsidies, for meal deliveries, right. To free them up from some of this domestic work so they could get back to their labs. But overwhelmingly what they requested was personnel for research They needed people to help them.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Either graders, TAs, help them in the classroom so they could do research or help them with their research too. So I think when we're thinking of solutions, it's not how to have them be better in their domestic life. But how can we facilitate their research identity. And so when publishers can think about what it takes to go through, right. There's copy-editing, there's proofreading.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Particularly for people for whom English isn't their first language. If publishers could provide small grants or fellowships to provide some of that kind of labor, that would be very interesting facilitating their submission. And dealing with all of that kind of administrative stuff that happens around the paper but is not directly related to the content of the research. So I think there could be a lot of work that could be done there.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: I mean what they want is to get their research out, right. And that's what we saw overwhelmingly in their responses both to that aid and then in a large scale survey that we did across the campus. It was the same thing. They want to keep active in the lab and they want to have resources necessary to do that.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I think, channeling this conversation back to Dr. May and his perspective as someone from Morgan State University. I would love to get a sense from your Dr. May. How do you reconcile some of what, we're hearing from Adriana about the stressors that researchers are under. Especially for an institution like Morgan State when you shared the information that HBCUs historically are already facing disparities in research funding.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And it's encouraging to see that it sounds like there are some increases coming about. But they aren't necessarily addressing the gaps that already existed prior to the pandemic. What is Morgan State's sort of philosophy around that in supporting their researchers?
WILLIE E. MAY: I don't want to speak for approvals. Without saying something. [LAUGHS] I think we are leading toward extending the tenure clock for faculty. And I certainly heard what Cassidy said and would like to speak with her more about that. If I had a vote, I would go to a faculty elect system. So that faculty could choose whether they want the tenure clock extended or they wanted to have the subsidy she talked about.
WILLIE E. MAY: But I wouldn't say, one size fits all because everybody's circumstances are different. But right now we're leaning primarily toward trying to extend the tenure clock. Because for the STEM faculty, the research labs were my call. And I elected to put together protocols to allow folks back into the laboratory. So that their careers were not as disrupted as they could have been by the pandemic.
WILLIE E. MAY: But people in some of the political and social sciences didn't have that same opportunity. So they I think were more affected by the pandemic than perhaps some of the STEM faculty were.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: That's interesting. Obviously speaking from the publisher hat and of course, the representative of the social sciences side Lois and I here, that gets me thinking. I mean Lois, from the peer review from the publisher perspective, what can we do? What can publishers office offer these researchers in these positions?
LOIS JONES: Yes I know-- I never know how much this really matters to the researchers. But what we talk about a lot internally is the empathy required. Because the peer review coordinates for our team, they get those responses back when people are like, I can't send up this on time. I have three people in my family in the hospital, I can't do this.
LOIS JONES: We get very detailed messages back from people like on the edge, in the middle of burnout, catastrophe in their lives. And it's heartbreaking. And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time with our teams talking about is, these are people, these are their careers. You are the front line people talking to them. As much as you can do like extensions if they need help submitting something in the system.
LOIS JONES: The peer review systems like they're complicated. We have a lot of different requirements for different journals. And when we can we say don't check like every single thing on initial submission. There are things you can deal with during a revision. And so, just extending the deadlines as much as we can. And that's kind of the day to day right now like us reacting to the pandemic, that's how we were doing it.
LOIS JONES: Is just giving as much sort of leeway as possible. Understanding everybody is a human in this process. I think long term we are going to have to talk a lot as a publisher about how we make sure that, it's not just, I forget who said it. I think it might have been Adriana where it's like, OK, is it sink or swim now? And yeah there's going to be authors out there. There's always going to be people who are managing to swim.
LOIS JONES: But that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to create an equitable, inclusive environment. And if we're just like, I don't know we still have authors. That's not what we're here for. So I think that I am really trying to listen to what authors and researchers are saying. What can we do to help. But I also don't want it to be a situation where we're telling the people in the problem situation to come up with the solutions.
LOIS JONES: So I think short term is really just working with people the best we can on that day-to-day basis. But long term, it's really-- I'm open to ideas. So if anybody listening, anybody attending wants to email me and give me some more ideas on that I am open to it. Because I think that one of my concerns generally in the world is that when something's over everybody's like we're done, we're out of the pandemic, the world is fixed.
LOIS JONES: But there's always this lasting effects that people get bored of hearing and I don't want people being left behind. Because we're just tired of talking about it. That is going to put us back so far. And like I said, that's not the point of anything we're doing.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Yeah, that's certainly insightful. Thank you. We have a lot of questions in the chat. And I'm not sure that we'll have time to get to all of them. But I will pose this one to Adriana because I think it's an interesting one. Randy Townsend asked, are there opportunities for you to build connections with other researchers? Navigating these shared challenges. And do you see more collaboration or competition among your peers in this environment.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Well, that's an interesting question. I don't know if I see more collaboration or competition. It seems like a little bit of both. I just, I guess-- I don't know, I don't have a straightforward answer for that. I think that in general people have been empathetic of everyone's situation. So then, they're willing to help.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But then at the same time everyone's so burned out at this point. That we're looking just for ourselves too. So I don't know. I don't have a straightforward answer unfortunately. I don't think things are turning more collaborative. I also don't think that there's more competition. It's just such a strange, strange times.
WILLIE E. MAY: Certainly a time like none of us on this call, here on the panel on the call have ever lived through before.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Absolutely. I'm coming through here to see if we have time for one more question that dropped in the chat. This was an earlier one, for Doctor May. Are you seeing significant differences in traditional scholarly outputs at HBCUs versus PWIs, or predominantly white institutions. Why is that? I know you touched a bit on that in your talk. But I'd love to hear if you're seeing sort of additional pressures up here in light of the pandemic.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And if so, what are some solutions to mitigate that?
WILLIE E. MAY: OK. I'm not speaking for Morgan State University. I'm speaking for Willie E. May now. As I said, HBCUs were established as teaching institutions. Not research institutions. And I show data on some of the funding disparities. But you got to have funding to conduct research to publish. So basically, HBCUs are lagging behind PWIs. Because we don't have the resources.
WILLIE E. MAY: Now that has changed. We have 11 HBCUs that are our two universities. And I think all of us are aspiring to be R1. So I think, going forward, we have a possibility that some of that will compress among the research universities. But they are still a whole host of universities who still see their role and justifiably so, as instructional organizations.
WILLIE E. MAY: So faculty are hard to teach, not to conduct research. And we have some of that at Morgan also. All of our teach-- the other point is, at Morgan and I think many other HBCUs, professors are teaching for courses. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time to do research. Where faculty at PWIs don't have a full course load if they are research for fact.
WILLIE E. MAY: So there are lots and lots of reasons for that. I think, certainly at Morgan we see that. And we are going to take steps to alleviate that. And we were about to do that and then COVID happened. And everybody was scrambling and seeing how we were going to survive through this period. We could go-- so we could not bring on additional faculty to allow the release time that we needed because, we thought we were going to all go bankrupt.
WILLIE E. MAY: [LAUGHS] We weren't sure. So I think going forward we can look at this and figure out a way to better strike this balance. But right, we were in crisis mode for the past year and a half.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I think that that crisis mode resonates with many of us I'm sure. I think we are just out of time. So I think we're going to close up now. Thank you so much to all of you for such an engaging discussion. I think, it's clear as Cassidy said that this is an ongoing issue. One that needs to continue to be addressed.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And I'm encouraged by some of the solutions that we talked about today. But it's clear that there's more work to be done. Dr. Bahmani from Elsevier actually spoke in another session yesterday. Saying something similar that, funders, institutions, universities, we all have a role to play in addressing these existing disparities and these pressures on researchers.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I would add publishers to that list too. And I think acknowledging them is a great first step. Backing them with data is a great first step. But of course, there's more work to be done as Joseph Williams said earlier today. So I think the next question for all of us is, where do we go from here? One plug that we do want to give to our attendees at this point is if you'd like to get involved, if you'd like to be a part of these conversations, I highly encourage you to learn more about SSP's own Diversity, Equity Inclusion Committee.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: It's a wonderful group of people who are doing a lot of the hard work to have and navigate these tricky conversations. There is a get involved session on Wednesday, June 9th at noon Eastern time. We'll drop some information about that in the chat for you all. But we definitely encourage you to learn more and get involved with SSPs committee if you're interested.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you so much again to the panelists for joining us. I'll hand it over to CC to close us out. But I appreciate all of the time.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Steph, I think did it so eloquently. I don't have to add anything more. But just to say that each one of the conversation and whatever data you've presented, it's an initiative in the making. So we would like to bring you back. And give you the amount of time that you need to talk about all these important topics. That need to be dissected for the scholarly publishing landscape to move in the right direction.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Thank you so much for joining us today.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thanks, everyone.
WILLIE E. MAY: Thanks to you all.
Segment:0 .
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Some of them.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: That's great.
WILLIE E. MAY: Yeah, I think so overall. I was-- I have a few nuances since I sent mine in. So I'll send you the following day also.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Perfect. We'll give folks a few seconds to funnel in here before we get started. All right, let's get started. Welcome, everyone.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: We are so glad to have you joining us for today's session on Retrogressing Research and Limiting Diversity: The Pandemic's Impact on Scholarly Publishing Inequities. The session is being moderated by Dr. Chhavi Chauhan and myself. And we have four wonderful panelists joining us today. I'd like to know a few housekeeping items before we get started.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: So as you can see the session is in webinar format. So participants will be muted. The session is being recorded. And I believe there's a plan to have the recording available on the SSP website later this week, through November I believe. We'll ask that you drop any questions for the panelists in the chat box on the Pathable site. We'll be monitoring that chat box for any questions that come through.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I'll also note that Dr. Chhavi Chauhan will be live tweeting our session. So if you'd like to follow along with her tweets feel free to follow her. I think she will drop her Twitter handle on the chat on Pathable. And with that, I'd like to introduce Dr. Chhavi as my wonderful, co-organizer and co-moderator for the session.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Chhavi is the Director for Scientific Outreach at the American Society for Investigative Pathology. And she's the director of the CMU Program at the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. She is one of the leaders of the Women in AI Ethics collectives. And she's an expert at the AI Policy Exchange. She's a biomedical researcher and expert scholarly communicator. And a sought after mentor in the fields of scientific research, scholarly publishing and AI Ethics especially for women and minorities.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: She's a thought leader, a renowned international speaker and a strong advocate for equitable and accessible health care. She sits at the intersection of scientific research, scholarly communications and AI ethics in health care. Her vision is to provide equitable, personalized health care to all beyond geographies and despite socioeconomic disparities. I'm also personally pleased to note that Chhavi has recently been appointed as our newest co-chair for SSP's own Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Committee.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And we are so lucky to have her leading that team. And with that, I will hand it over to Chhavi.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Well, thank you so much Steph. That was such a kind introduction. And for the record, it is my pleasure and honor to have collaborated with Steph on this exciting and timely session. For those of you who do not know yet, my esteemed partner, Stephanie Pollock, is Associate Publisher, Community Initiatives of the American Psychological Association. There she drives strategy and publishing partner engagement for the APA Journal Program And serves as the Journal's Program lead for equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Our speaker, Lois, joins me to talk about some of these during the session and I'm excited about that. The ten years of experience in scholarly publishing, Steph is committed to improving equity in both the field of psychology and in scholarly publishing industry. She is a 2016 graduate of the Master in Professional Studies and Publishing program, at the George Washington University. A member of the Association for Women in Psychology. And has served on SSP's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee since 2018.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Welcome Steph. And please take it away from here.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you so much Chhavi. So a little bit about our structure today, we're going to first hear a few short presentations from three of our wonderful panelists. And our hope is that this will set the stage for a structured discussion that we'll have in the latter half of the session. We're also definitely hoping to leave some time for audience Q&A. So please we encourage you to participate heavily. Drop your questions and comments in the chat on Pathable throughout.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And with that, we can get started. So our first speaker is Dr. Willie May. While he pulls up his slides I'll be pleased to introduce him and share a little bit more about him. So Dr. May is the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Morgan State University. Prior to Morgan, Dr. May served as the Director of Major Research and Training Initiatives for the College of Computer, Mathematical and the Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Where he developed new relationships and expanded existing partnerships with corporations, foundations, and government agencies. And assisted the college in obtaining additional support for graduate student education, training and mentoring. Dr. May has also served in several high profile positions prior to these roles. Including as the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology. He has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park. And his work has been published in more than 90 peer reviewed publications. And he's given more than 300 invited lectures at conferences and symposia around the world. He's also been recognized by CandEN News magazine as the federal government's top chemist.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And as Laboratory Director of the Year by the Federal Laboratory Consortium. We're so happy to have him here today. So take it away Dr. May.
WILLIE E. MAY: Well, good afternoon. And thanks so much for that very gracious introduction. I'd like to spend a few moments talking about the impact of the pandemic on scholarly publications of Morgan State University. Which is indicative of many HBCUs, I think. I start by saying that there are over 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the United States.
WILLIE E. MAY: Slightly more than 260 of those are called research universities. And about half of those are top tier research institutions are called R1 by the Carnegie Institution. And the latter half of those are R2 universities. And Morgan falls into the R2 universities. As do 11 other HBCUs. And I think the talk that I'm going to give, on behalf of Morgan State University, is probably indicative of many of those other R2 HBCUs.
WILLIE E. MAY: Although I'm clearly speaking for Willie May and for Morgan State University and not the other, HBCUs. A bit about Morgan State University. Morgan was founded in 1867. And like all other HBCUs, well, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, they were founded to provide education to their recently emancipated slaves.
WILLIE E. MAY: So they did not have a research agenda. They were finishing school, instructional schools. As I just said now, have earned the classification of an R2 research university. One of about 130 of those in the country. And like I said, 11 or 12 of those are HBCUs. In 2017 we were given the designation by our state legislature, as Maryland's Pre-eminent Urban Public Research University.
WILLIE E. MAY: We have around, approaching 8,000 students. Fairly evenly divided by gender. 56% men and 44% women. About 17 of the 7,800 students we have are graduate students. And we have-- we offer programs-- we offer 46 BS degrees, 34 master's category and we offer PhDs in 18 areas as of now.
WILLIE E. MAY: And we have at least about four more that were before our State Education Commission for approval. That's essentially who we are and where are we going? And you see a snapshot of our 10-year plan. And you see our four goals. I want read them all to you. But we-- I'll say something about goal two and goal three. We, as our aspirational goal to become an R1 University.
WILLIE E. MAY: Over the next 10 years. And in doing that, we plan to serve as a Premiere Anchor Institution for Urban Communities in general. And Baltimore City in specific. Now, we have two other R1 universities in the state of Maryland. University of Maryland, College Park and Johns Hopkins University. We are not going to become R1 by trying to mimic them.
WILLIE E. MAY: We plan to direct a disproportionate amount of our research, to addressing the issues of urban communities like we find in Baltimore. So we see that as our sweet spot, if you will. During COVID, we've conducted laboratory-based research. In fact, we only had our laboratories shut down for about two months. We began to open them as early as late last July.
WILLIE E. MAY: And we felt we had to do that if we were going to continue in our pursuit for being a top flight research university. Because with granting agencies once you turn that water off, it's not as easy to turn that faucet on. And we developed some strong protocols. And I'm not showing this information I should put it in the slide deck. But we have had a institute, a testing program for our faculty, staff and the students.
WILLIE E. MAY: That where we, had typically, a few test percent, positivity rate. Each week that we tested. And we tested between our staff, depending on how often they were on campus. Between once and three times per week. So that was very-- we thought that was very, very effective. And kept our roughly 1,000 students who were on campus during this past year, safe and healthy.
WILLIE E. MAY: We had a number of our faculty who got involved in public outreach and educational activities through local radio stations and writing scholarly papers. To keep our community abreast in what was going on with the vaccination. Try to avoid, to prevent vaccine hesitancy. And basically, educate them on how vaccines were actually made in general. So we had a number of seminars on that.
WILLIE E. MAY: And more recently, I think I've talked about the testing program, we actually, we are a vaccination site for the community. So we are testing site for our faculty, staff and students. We're a vaccination site for the community in general. Well, when we talk about publishing you don't-- to publish research results you have to have funds to do the research.
WILLIE E. MAY: And historically I said, HBCUs were teaching institutions. And our research universities, state research universities really exploded in the early 1960s. After these Russians light Sputnik. Our response to that was to put lots of money into scientific research. And besides Howard University, the HBCUs didn't get much of this.
WILLIE E. MAY: Because again we were teaching universities and structured universities, not research universities. And you can see that if you look over the past 10 years that's been a big discrepancy. Universities in general, federal funding for grants has gone up 20%. For HBCUs they've gone down 20%. So that's the situation that we find ourselves in. But we still punch above our weight.
WILLIE E. MAY: HBCUs make up less than 5% of all US colleges and universities. Yet we graduate, provide bachelor's degrees for a quarter of the African-Americans to get STEM degrees in our country. So here, just a snapshot that gives you an indication of what things look like at Morgan State University. I'm using our academic year, fiscal year of '17 '18 and '19 as base years.
WILLIE E. MAY: The first year of COVID at least a half academic year, FY20. You can see that we had an increase, in the number of peer reviewed journals. For FY21, we went up almost 30%. So I attribute this to the fact that our faculty had more time to actually focus on writing these things up. They couldn't go in to the lab. Well, they couldn't go in to the campus.
WILLIE E. MAY: So they saved the commute time. And I think people were just tired of being locked up, to be honest with you. So we found that our faculty in terms of peer reviewed journals, were more productive during this period. Conference proceedings as you might imagine went down because we weren't going to conferences. Book chapters went up, both years.
WILLIE E. MAY: Papers presented at conferences and symposia went down. Oh, grants that we received for conducting sponsored research, went up almost 10%, in 2020. And this year, went up about 12%. So basically, because we weren't going into campus it didn't mean that we weren't productive in scholarly activity, we weren't involved in scholarly activities.
WILLIE E. MAY: And this just shows that the grants, these were the grants we submitted. You can see, roughly 110 million, $100 million, slightly over $100 million, over the past three years. This year, it went up to almost 150 million, in grant proposals submitted. Now, they haven't been awarded yet but those were just our submissions.
WILLIE E. MAY: This is our publication for peer reviewed publications. You can see the breakdown between men and women. In 2021, our almost one peer review publication per faculty. If we were to look at this for our science and technology faculty, this is the entire staff, the entire faculty. Almost 1 to 1, for a peer reviewed published article.
WILLIE E. MAY: Almost 0.6 for women. Well, we know that in our society women traditionally have the role for providing much of the child care. And since children were at home a lot of this year, a lot more of that burden probably felt on our female faculty members. So the productivity of men went up quite a bit during this period.
WILLIE E. MAY: And women just slightly reduce past the norm. And the same for-- this is 4 book chapters. Didn't really see any affect there at all. So with that, I'll stop. And thank you for indulging me for going slightly over my time I'm sure.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: That's absolutely fine really. Those were some outstanding findings. And I shared some of the data that you presented today on Twitter. And we're getting a lot of responses. But I do understand that we have to wait for the attendee questions, as Steph mentioned earlier. We'll go through the presentations first. Next we have with us, Lois Jones. She's Peer Review Manager for the Journals Department of the American Psychological Association.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: There she co-manages the Peer Review Program. Which includes, 90 journals and 20 peer review coordinators. Lois is focused on ensuring a transparent and ethical peer review process for authors. While providing reviewers and editors, the exceptional support they need in the constantly changing landscape of scholarly publishing. She's 2014 graduate of the Master of Professional Studies in Publishing Program at the George Washington University.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: And of 2017, SSP Early Career Fellow. Currently, Lois serves on the inaugural editorial board, for GWU's Journal of Ethics in Publishing. I would like to add that I have had the privilege of connecting with Lois in the past. And I'm amazed by her passion and her drive. And it would not be an understatement to say, that she is one of my most favorite DNI. Or should I say, EBNI expert.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Welcome Lois.
LOIS JONES: Thank you. That's very nice to hear. So yeah, I'm talking about the Impact of COVID-19 on Author and Reviewer Behaviors by Gender. I will give the specific caveat that this is for our titles only. I know it's very different across some of the fields. Quick background on the American Psychological Association is, you might know it for a Publication Manual. We're also a membership organization.
LOIS JONES: And a publisher obviously. We have more than 90 psychology journals. We have a heavy focus on increasing our EDI efforts just across the board, throughout the whole Association. I do want to say. When we're talking about diversity, we're including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, country of origin and disability status.
LOIS JONES: Unfortunately for the specific data set it is limited only to gender. Hopefully we'll have more in the future though. So when COVID first hit, we did start seeing the concerns about who was going to be left behind in research and in publishing. At first it was just a general kind of discussion and concern. But then our editors started asking us that this is something we could actually monitor and track through our submission system.
LOIS JONES: So given that this last year can have lasting consequences and people's careers we thought that it was actually very important to try and track what's happening real time. One of the specific questions we had was that women were dropping out of the peer review and authorship activities at higher rates than men. Potentially due to their caregiving responsibilities. So some kind of notes up front on the data. This is based on authorship data as submitted to Editorial Manager during January to October of 2019.
LOIS JONES: And in the same period in 2020 so we're comparing the same time periods. During 2020 we didn't have a reliable way to collect meaningful demographics information in our submission system. That's changing soon. That's great. Very excited to see that update. So the gender had to be assigned by an algorithm, which is obviously limited by the binary view of gender as male or female.
LOIS JONES: And then if the algorithm couldn't make a good guess on it, it was going-- the person is listed as unidentifiable or unidentified. So as more people are identifying as non-binary or who have non-traditional gender identities, we do find that it's more appropriate to self report data. Additionally, the gender-guesser library that we used, has difficulty guessing gender on non-European names.
LOIS JONES: Which is a clear issue, especially as we've been trying to do more and more to increase international authorship. So we did have a very lengthy discussion internally about the appropriateness of using an algorithm. However, in the interest of progress versus perfection, which I've heard talk about in a couple of different sessions so far this year, we did want to move forward with the hope that the patterns would still be relevant across our journals.
LOIS JONES: In the future, like I said, we will be relying on more self-report data. That will hopefully be more representative and appropriate, and including race and ethnicity. Excuse me. So since intersectionality is so key in these discussions, it is unfortunate that's missing from this data set. So I will say that up front. But when we started to look at it, the specific questions that we were looking at were, were women less likely to be authors last year than in 2019.
LOIS JONES: And were they less likely to accept review invitations. Interestingly, we haven't seen the impact that we've heard from other publishers. I think my big caveat on that is we haven't seen it yet. There was no significant difference between the number of authors nor a number of reviewers. Early assessment does show that more editorial decisions were made by people who were designated as kind of female names by the algorithm.
LOIS JONES: So by women we're assuming. But we're not actually clear yet if that's a result of them taking on a larger portion of the extra submissions we received last year. Or if it's just due to the fact that a lot of our editors in 2019, very specifically brought in more women editors. And have been trying to increase the gender diversity across journals.
LOIS JONES: So it could just be, now we have more women as associate editors and as main editors. So we kind of delve into that a bit more. But so, kind of good news. When we pulled the data we did still have over 16% of the 2020 submissions in that time period that didn't have a final decision. So the numbers could change. Based on the submissions that have completed the full editorial process.
LOIS JONES: The rates are very similar across years. So for the acceptances and rejection rates, it's mostly, level kind of, obviously there's an increase in rejections and an increase in acceptances this year for 2020. Because there were so many more submissions. But we're not seeing differences between the genders. The unidentifiable names however could slightly change those results, which is why it's so important to get stronger data.
LOIS JONES: So big questions for the future. Women are still talking about the impact anecdotally. We hear it a lot. It's a very important conversation. So where is that impact on the data? Are we not looking at the right data? Are we looking at the data too soon? So for example are we going to see fewer new research studies that were started this last year by women?
LOIS JONES: Or are they dropping to less senior roles in the authorship? Because we did look at all of the authors. And we do have-- we are able to see-- if they were first author, last author, corresponding author, or just like any author in there. And with the paper submitted last year potentially based on research done in previous years. And so we also didn't do an analysis on the type of articles.
LOIS JONES: We had a lot of commentaries last year. There were some rapid reviews special issues. So that could-- there could be some differences in there. But a major focus for the future should be on collecting more self-report data. And looking at it more regularly. In addition to gender identity, like I said, we also think it's very important to get race and ethnicity in there.
LOIS JONES: As well as other demographics information. So overall, this is a first step. But we learned a lot about the process in general. And the pitfalls and the places where we need to get advice from other people or other organizations. So hopefully it will lead us to paying attention to the right things so that if we are going to see those impacts in the future, we're watching it and intervening and helping people out there.
LOIS JONES: Thank you.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you so much Lois for sharing that research. I think that's going to be a great contribution to our discussion in a bit. Lastly but certainly not least, we're going to hear from Dr. Cassidy Sugimoto. Dr. Sugimoto is a professor of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. She investigates the ways in which knowledge is produced, disseminated and rewarded. With a particular interest in issues of diversity and inclusion.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences. And the Sloan Foundation. She's actively involved in teaching and service. And she's been recognized in these areas with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award. And the Bicentennial Award. She's also currently serving as the President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informatics.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: She has an undergraduate degree in Music Performance. And Ms. in Library Science and a PhD in Information and library Science. All from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Take it away Cassidy.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Thank you so much Steph. And Chhavi made me promise to keep this to five minutes. And only focus on the key takeaways. So I'll just start here and say, the key takeaways that gender disparities existed before the pandemic. The pandemic made manifest to many of the inequities that were already in the system and magnified it. And it matters.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So I'll try to go over that with a few key data points in the next five minutes. But I hope that people will ask questions and come back together afterwards if you have any questions about these slides. So one is just the extent of gender disparities across the world. So what we're seeing here is female to male, or I should say women to men productivity by country from 2008 to 2017.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So the darker blue the country it is, the more production we have from authors who are quoted. In the same way Lois talked about algorithmically, as men and those from women. As you can see it's a very blue world. With men largely outnumbering women in terms of their authorship on scholarly publications. Now there's also differences in the types of labor that are conducted in order to become considered on the paper.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So if we break down something-- break down those authorship into a credit taxonomy. Looking at the roles and the labors that we're done in producing that authorship, we see very different things. Men are more likely to be associated with supervision, funding, resources, conceptualization, software. The editing and the reviewing, the project administration and validation.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Whereas women, are doing the methods, the visualization, all the analysis. Writing the full draft, data curation and investigation. So that presents a very different kind of picture when we think about the underrepresentation of women as authors. But their overemphasis and their overrepresentation in the core aspects of scientific discovery and work. So women as the hands of scientific labor.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: But not necessarily reaping the rewards of that labor. Now all of that matters when we think about retention and attrition in science. Where women fall on the bylines with paper as first or last as Lois talked about, become very dominant off the rolls. And what we see is that men are disproportionately likely to be in some of those key authorship roles very early in their career, much more likely than women.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And being in one of those key roles is a huge predictor of whether you stay in the scientific workforce. So when we're not involving women in those leadership positions during their graduate studies, we are less likely to keep them in the scientific system as well. And data that we have looked at from NCSCS. Which gives us race and ethnicity data says that the same thing is happening with minoritized individuals.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: They are less likely to receive a research assistantship, less likely to be on publications and less likely to be in some of those roles, that would lead them into a career path. So this becomes very important when we start looking at data for the pandemic. Equally important to what we see happening within science, we have to look at what happens within society. And Doctor May mentioned this in his presentations as well.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: The disproportionate labor that women put in domestic and care responsibilities. Whether it's child care, elder care or other family responsibilities. So in a survey that we conducted before the pandemic, we asked men and women to identify as either lead parents, dual parents those with shared equally shared parenting roles and those of satellite. Now may not be surprising to you that more female scholars identified as lead parents and more male scholars identified as satellite parents.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: But what was so shocking to us was, that equal proportion said that they were shared parents. And that was the majority of respondents. Of both male and female scholars saying we share parenting equally. But I'd love to show you all the results but I'll show you one of us breaking that down. So we asked them what time of day they were engaged in parenting and what kinds of activities they did.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So we asked these huge list of activities. Who is primarily responsible for play dates, birthday parties, snack, weekday shopping, bedtime stories? And women were disproportionately likely to perform all of the tasks. Regardless of whether they were identified as lead, dual or satellite parent. Save one, coaching sporting events. That was a very male parent kind of activity.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So what this suggests to us is that even when you're conceptualizing in a shared parenting relationship, there is unequal burden even within those spaces. That are disproportionately going to hit women. And then when manifestation that happens during the pandemic, shows us the effect of that exogenous shock on the academic workforce. Now again in pre-pandemic mode, we see that this has an effect on their productivity.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Those who are more engaged with parenting from the self-report data, are less productive than their peers who are in less engaged parenting roles. Now this affects both men and women. Anyone who has increased engagement with our children shows decreased productivity. But the gap is wider for women. Women are disproportionately harmed by parenting in terms of a productivity loss.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So of course it is no surprise that when the pandemic hit, we saw particularly in the submissions of preprint, those sort of early indicators of scientific activity, a decline in women. But a decline in women primarily in those first authorship roles. So while we saw women who were still staying on the authorship line they were being moved to middle authorship. Suggesting that they might have been on the scientific teams before.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: They had to take a step back in order to deal with care responsibilities. And so they were retained on the byline but not retained in those dominant positions. Which has implications for their career trajectories. Now also worrisome, is that they were disproportionately left out of COVID-related topics. Which shows an inability to sort of pivot to those fast moving topics.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And that they weren't engaged in the design of new research during the pandemic. Now you may say, well, why does this matter? Right, science is neutral. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female or Black or White. Right, a pipette is a pipette, it shouldn't really matter. What we see as it has huge implications on the design of research itself.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So what you're seeing here was a study we did from PubMed. Looking at biomedical research, public health research, and clinical medicine. To see whether there were disproportionate emphasis on the study populations themselves. So in obstetrics and gynecology, you study women, more than you study men, right. Urology studies men more than women, that makes sense. But we saw a huge difference in psychiatry, and embryology, and genetics.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: In terms of the male and female representation of the populations. Either the sex of the cell, the mammal population that was used. Or in public health research, the human populations that were used. So this has huge effects. It changes what we know about men and women within these topics.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And when we looked at this by authorship, we found that women were significantly more likely to take sex into an account, when they were doing their studies. And significantly more likely to study women. So this homophily bias comes in. The more women you have in the biomedical workforce the more we know about the female body. And given that it's 50% of the population and 100% of the birthing population, that seems fairly important.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Now a recent study has also been looking at this as it goes across topic spaces. Both with looking at feminization, the degree of women in a particular discipline. And then the racial group proportion. Using US census data we're able to algorithmically derive whether an individual is likely to be associated with Black, Hispanic, White or Asian population. And we see that there is a topical disparity.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: With the Black scholars more likely to study issues related to African-Americans, racial disparities. For our Hispanic populations, more likely to look at topics around Latinos, racial disparities in English and Spanish issues within the area of health. And so again this reinforces the idea that it is not just a social justice issue, but really changing the composition of the scientific workforce changes what we know.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: And what topics are valued and studied. So the removal of some populations during this pandemic matters for science. Thank you.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Well, thank you so much Dr. Sugimoto. That was terrific. And you're sitting on a data mine. And it was heartbreaking for me to ask you to cut back on your slides. But I know you're such an eloquent speaker that you'll still deliver. And thank you so much for that. We're getting a lot of comments from the attendees here. But before we move on to that, I would love to introduce our last speaker Dr.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Romero-Olivares She's not presenting any slides. But she brings in the researcher perspective. To give a little background, Dr. Romero-Olivares is a soil microbiologist. Who works at the Intersection of Ecosystem, Ecology and Evolution. She's interested in understanding how microbes respond, and adapt to environmental stress. If we only knew how to do that, huh?
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Our overall research goal is to better understand and plan for ecosystem scale effects of global climate change. She's originally from Mexico. And received her PhD from the University of California Irvine. Where she investigated the effects of global warming on the soil microbial communities of Boreal forest in Alaska. She then did her post at the University of New Hampshire, where she was a diversity and innovation scholar.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Studying the mission of microbial volatiles in soils experiencing long term warming and nitrogen pollution at Harvard Forest. She's now an Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University. Where she's exploring microbial communities of drylands of the Southwest of the USA. Welcome Doctor Romero-Olivares. With your outstanding background, I think can talk about--
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Thank you.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Yeah, we're so glad to have you here. We can just talk about so many topics. And at length I guess. But in the interest of time and for the sake of this panel, I would like to welcome you to share your thoughts on the effect of the ongoing pandemic, in retrogressing research and limiting diversity. Especially in scholarly publishing space.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Yeah, of course. I started my position as an assistant professor at New Mexico State in August of 2020. So not the best time to start up a lab. And buy things. I ordered a bunch of things to populate my lab. There's some of those things that I haven't gotten just yet. Because they're back ordered. There's a lot of-- just the trophic chain of things have been completely disrupted because of the pandemic.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: And it's not only affecting those of us who started our lab, last year or this year. But it's also affecting a lot of labs that had been running for a few years or for many years. There's just basic things that we haven't been able to get. Basic consumables that you need for all sorts of research. And it's been really disruptive. And I do like to point out that that is my situation here in the US, one of the most privileged countries in the world.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: I have a lot of colleagues in Mexico and other places in Latin America. And things there are far worse. Things usually take longer to arrive over there. So with the pandemic right now it's just unmeasurable, how much time is being lost because things are back-ordered. Borders are closed. And it's just been a huge disruption to research in general.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Which is going to translate to less productivity in terms of manuscripts and research results just in general.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I think that's fascinating to hear, Adriana. Thank you so much for sharing that. And hearing you talk about even the almost baseline necessities for running your lab not even being available, obviously in the middle of the pandemic. But even still now it's clear that you're still grappling with some of the challenges of trying to do your work in the middle of coming out of a pandemic. And I think that speaks to something Lois said earlier where she was saying, even if we're not seeing results from the data yet it's clear that these disparities are continuing, right, that they're not going away.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And I was wondering if you could speak a bit to what that means for you as a researcher, for your career, for your approach to building out your contribution to the science. What that means for you.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Yeah, of course. It's very stressful for me. I'm in a timeline. I am on a tenure track position. Meaning that in four years I need to go through this very extensive review of my productivity, and my intellectual contribution to the sciences. And only if a committee inside the University and outside the University deems that my work was meaningful enough and that I was productive enough, then I'm going to get tenure.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Meaning that I'm going to stay in this University indefinitely. So in the tenure track it's not stopping because of the pandemic. So for me it's really stressful. Trying to get things going. And not being able to because there's disruptions that I have no control over. So a lot of those of us assistant professors were going through this very stressful times.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: I'm just trying to remain productive in the middle of this whole situation aside from the fact that if you're a caregiver, if you're a woman, if you are a person of color and so on. So those things add up. So it is an extremely stressful time for all of us. In addition, there's been like cuts to science budgets. I am an ecologist. So maybe those people who are studying like COVID for example, they have a lot of research funds for them to look into that.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But for those of us doing other types of scientific research, . We've also seen cuts to scientific budget there's been massive University cuts because drops of enrollment and so on. And all of those things add up. For example, in my University we had to, they had to cut a lot of lecture positions and other administrative positions. And all of that means-- that I mean those administrative jobs and those classes they need to happen still.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But now all of those administrative burdens and all of those extra teaching hours fall mostly on us faculty. So it's a time of a lot of stress because we have to be very productive with research. But then all of a sudden, we have to do a lot of administrative tasks. That we didn't have to do before. We have to teach more hours.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: So just overall it's really stressful.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: That sounds incredibly stressful. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I hear this and obviously my first thought is, where do you get the support that you need to address some of these stressors? Obviously this is something that you can't take on, on your own and you shouldn't have to take on your own. What are-- are there sort of aspects within your university that are helping to try to mitigate some of this? Is everyone just sort of in a sink or swim environment?
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Or they're anything in between?
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Yeah I think that, so in some cases tenure extensions have been granted. Especially for people that were going for tenure last year. They provided like a one year extension. I believe, I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that I am eligible for a one year extension as well. But, the consequences of the pandemic we're not going to make up for those in just a year. So I haven't decided yet if I'm going to take about one year tenure extension.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But it is a possibility. Other than that, I mean, there's not a lot of support system, especially within the University. Everyone in the University struggling, especially those that lost their jobs. The administration is just looking to save money I guess. So they're not really investing a lot on support systems, especially not for faculty. There are some resources for students but I wouldn't say there are for faculty.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: And I mean, no, it's pretty much we're on our own. I mean I'm relying a lot on some of my colleagues. I'm part of a network called Woman of Color in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. And it's mostly other scientist in my area. We have like a slack channel. For faculty and I mean we vent there, we commiserate. But that's pretty much it. I rely a lot on my husband.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: He's also a professor. And he's just been very helpful just in anything that I need. But I wouldn't say that there's like a structure system of support.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Wow. And we are getting a lot more questions for you Adriana. But I want to give opportunity to the other speakers as well. And also raise a concern that I heard yesterday, in one of the presentations. And I jumped at the opportunity at the time. They were talking about a platform of identifying funding sources, where the funding is going to which subjects. To be able to proactively create special journals or special issues to be able to publish that research which is getting funded.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: But here we are on the other end where the people are not getting funding. They're already struggling to perform their research. So how can we, as a scholarly publishing community, incentivize or provide any incentives in terms of publication to those people who are already struggling to do research? Forget about publishing that research in the future. And this is a little offtrack.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: What people want to know, from Cassidy and Adriana, what think about PNT committees if they're going to be needing to recognize the disproportionate impact of women during review period. And you too really. Like what should we do about it.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: That's a great question. I'll answer first the PNT question and then go back to the scholarly publishing one. So I mean, across the board most institutions took tenure extensions. And I actually disagree with tenure extensions. I think it increases your time of vulnerability. It keeps populations in precarious positions longer than necessary. I think that if you do that if you move with a tenure extension what I would like to see is that the institution also does salary compensation at the other end of that.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: So if someone extends for a year and then gets tenure, I would like to see them back paid for the year of salary loss in extending that tenure. They didn't extend for personal reason, they extended for because an exogenous shock hit the system. It is not their fault. They should not have to bear the financial consequences of that extension. But I also think that, extensions or not, we have to retrain our PNT committees.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: If we have the same expectations going in and an extension just means they have to produce one more year of work. It doesn't actually free them up from that lost year of productivity. And so, I think that we need to be very careful about using that as sort of a blanket commitment to our faculty. I think it needs to come with other incentives.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Adriana, I don't know if you're going to say something on that. And then I have some publishing ideas. [LAUGHS]
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: I don't have much to say about it. I think that the promotion and tenure system needs some sort of renewal. It's just not working the way that-- when it was set up, it was set up for mostly White man that had a housewife at home taking care of everything. That is not the case anymore in the system. It doesn't work for quote unquote, "like modern assistant assistants." I don't have much to say other than that.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES:
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: I'd love to go back to what are interesting things that SPP and other publishers could do? And so Indiana I was so impressed with them. The BPR's office really said, OK, we see that this is going to take a hit in research. How do we deal with the research issues? And so they asked for short term, mid-term and long term solution. So in the short term we did a gender equity fund. And we provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in these very small grants, to anyone who applied.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: It wasn't limited by gender but it was predominantly women who applied, predominantly assistant professors who applied. And we put in options for caregiving subsidies, for meal deliveries, right. To free them up from some of this domestic work so they could get back to their labs. But overwhelmingly what they requested was personnel for research They needed people to help them.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Either graders, TAs, help them in the classroom so they could do research or help them with their research too. So I think when we're thinking of solutions, it's not how to have them be better in their domestic life. But how can we facilitate their research identity. And so when publishers can think about what it takes to go through, right. There's copy-editing, there's proofreading.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: Particularly for people for whom English isn't their first language. If publishers could provide small grants or fellowships to provide some of that kind of labor, that would be very interesting facilitating their submission. And dealing with all of that kind of administrative stuff that happens around the paper but is not directly related to the content of the research. So I think there could be a lot of work that could be done there.
CASSIDY SUGIMOTO: I mean what they want is to get their research out, right. And that's what we saw overwhelmingly in their responses both to that aid and then in a large scale survey that we did across the campus. It was the same thing. They want to keep active in the lab and they want to have resources necessary to do that.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I think, channeling this conversation back to Dr. May and his perspective as someone from Morgan State University. I would love to get a sense from your Dr. May. How do you reconcile some of what, we're hearing from Adriana about the stressors that researchers are under. Especially for an institution like Morgan State when you shared the information that HBCUs historically are already facing disparities in research funding.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And it's encouraging to see that it sounds like there are some increases coming about. But they aren't necessarily addressing the gaps that already existed prior to the pandemic. What is Morgan State's sort of philosophy around that in supporting their researchers?
WILLIE E. MAY: I don't want to speak for approvals. Without saying something. [LAUGHS] I think we are leading toward extending the tenure clock for faculty. And I certainly heard what Cassidy said and would like to speak with her more about that. If I had a vote, I would go to a faculty elect system. So that faculty could choose whether they want the tenure clock extended or they wanted to have the subsidy she talked about.
WILLIE E. MAY: But I wouldn't say, one size fits all because everybody's circumstances are different. But right now we're leaning primarily toward trying to extend the tenure clock. Because for the STEM faculty, the research labs were my call. And I elected to put together protocols to allow folks back into the laboratory. So that their careers were not as disrupted as they could have been by the pandemic.
WILLIE E. MAY: But people in some of the political and social sciences didn't have that same opportunity. So they I think were more affected by the pandemic than perhaps some of the STEM faculty were.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: That's interesting. Obviously speaking from the publisher hat and of course, the representative of the social sciences side Lois and I here, that gets me thinking. I mean Lois, from the peer review from the publisher perspective, what can we do? What can publishers office offer these researchers in these positions?
LOIS JONES: Yes I know-- I never know how much this really matters to the researchers. But what we talk about a lot internally is the empathy required. Because the peer review coordinates for our team, they get those responses back when people are like, I can't send up this on time. I have three people in my family in the hospital, I can't do this.
LOIS JONES: We get very detailed messages back from people like on the edge, in the middle of burnout, catastrophe in their lives. And it's heartbreaking. And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time with our teams talking about is, these are people, these are their careers. You are the front line people talking to them. As much as you can do like extensions if they need help submitting something in the system.
LOIS JONES: The peer review systems like they're complicated. We have a lot of different requirements for different journals. And when we can we say don't check like every single thing on initial submission. There are things you can deal with during a revision. And so, just extending the deadlines as much as we can. And that's kind of the day to day right now like us reacting to the pandemic, that's how we were doing it.
LOIS JONES: Is just giving as much sort of leeway as possible. Understanding everybody is a human in this process. I think long term we are going to have to talk a lot as a publisher about how we make sure that, it's not just, I forget who said it. I think it might have been Adriana where it's like, OK, is it sink or swim now? And yeah there's going to be authors out there. There's always going to be people who are managing to swim.
LOIS JONES: But that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to create an equitable, inclusive environment. And if we're just like, I don't know we still have authors. That's not what we're here for. So I think that I am really trying to listen to what authors and researchers are saying. What can we do to help. But I also don't want it to be a situation where we're telling the people in the problem situation to come up with the solutions.
LOIS JONES: So I think short term is really just working with people the best we can on that day-to-day basis. But long term, it's really-- I'm open to ideas. So if anybody listening, anybody attending wants to email me and give me some more ideas on that I am open to it. Because I think that one of my concerns generally in the world is that when something's over everybody's like we're done, we're out of the pandemic, the world is fixed.
LOIS JONES: But there's always this lasting effects that people get bored of hearing and I don't want people being left behind. Because we're just tired of talking about it. That is going to put us back so far. And like I said, that's not the point of anything we're doing.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Yeah, that's certainly insightful. Thank you. We have a lot of questions in the chat. And I'm not sure that we'll have time to get to all of them. But I will pose this one to Adriana because I think it's an interesting one. Randy Townsend asked, are there opportunities for you to build connections with other researchers? Navigating these shared challenges. And do you see more collaboration or competition among your peers in this environment.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: Well, that's an interesting question. I don't know if I see more collaboration or competition. It seems like a little bit of both. I just, I guess-- I don't know, I don't have a straightforward answer for that. I think that in general people have been empathetic of everyone's situation. So then, they're willing to help.
ADRIANA ROMERO-OLIVARES: But then at the same time everyone's so burned out at this point. That we're looking just for ourselves too. So I don't know. I don't have a straightforward answer unfortunately. I don't think things are turning more collaborative. I also don't think that there's more competition. It's just such a strange, strange times.
WILLIE E. MAY: Certainly a time like none of us on this call, here on the panel on the call have ever lived through before.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Absolutely. I'm coming through here to see if we have time for one more question that dropped in the chat. This was an earlier one, for Doctor May. Are you seeing significant differences in traditional scholarly outputs at HBCUs versus PWIs, or predominantly white institutions. Why is that? I know you touched a bit on that in your talk. But I'd love to hear if you're seeing sort of additional pressures up here in light of the pandemic.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And if so, what are some solutions to mitigate that?
WILLIE E. MAY: OK. I'm not speaking for Morgan State University. I'm speaking for Willie E. May now. As I said, HBCUs were established as teaching institutions. Not research institutions. And I show data on some of the funding disparities. But you got to have funding to conduct research to publish. So basically, HBCUs are lagging behind PWIs. Because we don't have the resources.
WILLIE E. MAY: Now that has changed. We have 11 HBCUs that are our two universities. And I think all of us are aspiring to be R1. So I think, going forward, we have a possibility that some of that will compress among the research universities. But they are still a whole host of universities who still see their role and justifiably so, as instructional organizations.
WILLIE E. MAY: So faculty are hard to teach, not to conduct research. And we have some of that at Morgan also. All of our teach-- the other point is, at Morgan and I think many other HBCUs, professors are teaching for courses. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time to do research. Where faculty at PWIs don't have a full course load if they are research for fact.
WILLIE E. MAY: So there are lots and lots of reasons for that. I think, certainly at Morgan we see that. And we are going to take steps to alleviate that. And we were about to do that and then COVID happened. And everybody was scrambling and seeing how we were going to survive through this period. We could go-- so we could not bring on additional faculty to allow the release time that we needed because, we thought we were going to all go bankrupt.
WILLIE E. MAY: [LAUGHS] We weren't sure. So I think going forward we can look at this and figure out a way to better strike this balance. But right, we were in crisis mode for the past year and a half.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I think that that crisis mode resonates with many of us I'm sure. I think we are just out of time. So I think we're going to close up now. Thank you so much to all of you for such an engaging discussion. I think, it's clear as Cassidy said that this is an ongoing issue. One that needs to continue to be addressed.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: And I'm encouraged by some of the solutions that we talked about today. But it's clear that there's more work to be done. Dr. Bahmani from Elsevier actually spoke in another session yesterday. Saying something similar that, funders, institutions, universities, we all have a role to play in addressing these existing disparities and these pressures on researchers.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: I would add publishers to that list too. And I think acknowledging them is a great first step. Backing them with data is a great first step. But of course, there's more work to be done as Joseph Williams said earlier today. So I think the next question for all of us is, where do we go from here? One plug that we do want to give to our attendees at this point is if you'd like to get involved, if you'd like to be a part of these conversations, I highly encourage you to learn more about SSP's own Diversity, Equity Inclusion Committee.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: It's a wonderful group of people who are doing a lot of the hard work to have and navigate these tricky conversations. There is a get involved session on Wednesday, June 9th at noon Eastern time. We'll drop some information about that in the chat for you all. But we definitely encourage you to learn more and get involved with SSPs committee if you're interested.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thank you so much again to the panelists for joining us. I'll hand it over to CC to close us out. But I appreciate all of the time.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Steph, I think did it so eloquently. I don't have to add anything more. But just to say that each one of the conversation and whatever data you've presented, it's an initiative in the making. So we would like to bring you back. And give you the amount of time that you need to talk about all these important topics. That need to be dissected for the scholarly publishing landscape to move in the right direction.
CHHAVI CHAUHAN: Thank you so much for joining us today.
STEPHANIE POLLACK: Thanks, everyone.
WILLIE E. MAY: Thanks to you all.
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