Recommend interviewees and reviewers for a future episode

[aprilcs]

This issue is to collect recommendations for interviewees and reviewers.

Recommendations should include who we should interview, what issue or innovation in science the interview should relate to, and any references or background that support the recommendation.

If you see a recommendation you like, please add a +1!

[SamanthaHindle]

Hi April, Have you heard about the amazing work done by iBiology? They're a non-profit that produces free online videos that cover a broad area of science but they are also really passionate about science education (they produce workshops/flipped courses) and career development. They will be launching their beta-testing of a 5-week free online career development course that will be officially released in a few months. The course aims to provide guidance to ECRs in choosing a lab/supervisor/project and includes advice from ~15 well-established mentors around the world.

So many researchers don't get adequate mentoring before and during their PhD/postdoc and this course is aiming to resolve that in a very open and accessible manner. If you are interested in discussing some of these issues of inequality in ECR training, you should contact Alex Schnoes (Associate Director of Career and Professional Development) or Shannon Behrman (Associate Director of Scientific Training and Education).

I hope this is useful! Good luck with the podcast! I'll contribute more later.

[DamienIrving]

I attended an excellent talk yesterday from @sdiggs at Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Trump-era environmental data rescue efforts being conducted by Data Refuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

It turns out (not surprisingly) that in the initial rush of enthusiasm to save data things could have been done better, so those groups are now engaging with the traditional academic data curation community. A good summary of the current state of affairs is a report from Earth Science Information Partners called Stronger Together.

[DamienIrving]

If you wanted to interview someone about how we could do tertiary science education better, @gvwilson would be the person to talk to. He was a co-founder of Software Carpentry and has written extensively on best practices in educating scientists. Equally, he'd be great to talk to about computational literacy in the science community (and how to improve it).

[DamienIrving]

If it's not too rude to self nominate, I'd also be very happy to speak about reproducible research. It's obviously a big topic, so I'd be specifically interested in speaking about the computational aspect of the reproducibility crisis. In other words, how we could/should be documenting the software and code used to produce the key results in our journal papers. It was a focus of my PhD (see this blog post and publication for details) and something I've spoken on extensively at international scientific conferences.

[DamienIrving]

While I'm on a roll, @apepe (co-founder of Authorea) would be a great person to interview about the future of scientific publishing.