One of the fundamental problems of making anything public, especially given the growth of the internet, is the potential for it to spread out of control. When anything can be published on one side of the world and read in seconds on the other, it is equally possible for material to be replicated with composite ease, leaving its creator powerless. The internet now makes any content vulnerable to outright plagiarism or theft of intellectual ideas. This does not just affect the world of academia. Any professional material can be leeched and re-published by industry competitors hoping to gain undue advantages. When livelihoods are resultant on the quality and originality of work, any illegal propagation of material spells possible disaster.

Universities, for their part, are now required to make decisions on policies relating to the availability of eTheses. Some have proposed that electronic theses should be made fully available online in repositories, which would severely compromise the ability of post-docs to publish their material and ruin a vital step in the candidates' quests for future employability. Some, more to the point, and rather alarmingly, already adopt this policy. A Google search for 'eTheses' will show you the repositories already openly available.

The academic publishing industry is already stretched precariously thin in places and is requiring more flexibility and innovation to avoid the flagrant duplication seen in the past across journals and monographs. If consensus is not reached universally, the sensitivity with which universities handle this issue of eThesis availability may begin to affect a prospective research postgraduate’s choice of institution.

What Can We Do?

1. Check and Challenge: While universities will claim some of the ownership of doctoral theses, should we not at least have the right to choose to withhold our work for our own best interests? Universities may wish to boast of their graduates’ current research activity with the means so easily available but that should not be a decision taken exclusively by the institution. We need to be checking our universities’ policies on eTheses, and challenging through our home departments if the policies are unreasonable.

2. Common Sense: We’ve all heard of the Facebook fall-down, where embarrassing pictures in the public domain can return to haunt users. Unsurprisingly, what is never made public causes fewer problems. Academic community sites like Academia.edu are set up to encourage members to share papers, which is fine in principle, but it is our responsibility to think very carefully about what appears in the public domain. Research is particularly vulnerable, one would have thought, since people can be savvy about the theft of intellectual ideas. There are equally strong ways of building up a research profile without laying written work on an electronic plate for everyone to help themselves.

3. Tools of the Trade: Since the internet allows such magnanimous sharing of material, there has been a need for tools to ensure that this is not abused. One such item is the site Copyscape, which can scan URLs and detect duplicate material elsewhere on the net. This can be important if your blog has professional significance or if it contains (as mine does) a tangential drip-feed of current research. Duplicate material is penalised in search engines, and is, if not illegal, extremely poor etiquette. Getting material removed that is out of your jurisdiction is not an easy task, but being alert to it is at least one step in your favour. We live in an information age; we must be prepared for the problems that come hand-in-hand with it.

Has anyone been victim to online plagiarism? Have these issues affected the way you view the interest in a research capacity? Has anyone been contacted recently by their universities regarding the publication of e-theses? Any thoughts regarding any of these issues would be most welcome!

Judging or Perceiving???

What did I learn from MBTI?  Stepping out of your comfort zone, or type cast can actually be counter-productive!  It is not your natural way.  Possibly the first time I have encountered reasoning for sticking to my type... as annoying as it maybe to the other 'type'! 

I am perceiver; I live on the spontaneity and the go-with-the-flow.  As a result I am the one who is hurtling onto trains as the whistle blows, or running through airports to get to the ‘last call for...' and yes the all night bender, at the computer that is, writing up a report!  I'm sure the judging of you will find this idea preposterous and infuriating!

I do. I'm lucky if I don't get it about once a week. Regardless of whether I get good feedback from my supervisor, have an abstract accepted for a conference or drink quite a lot of wine, it's still there. It particularly thrives on constructive criticism, though: "You might want to re-word this sentence" turns it into a raging monster.

The 'imposter phenomenon' is an actual psychological issue. It is debated, but there does seem to be evidence that some successful people genuinely feel like frauds. As postgrad students, I think we're more likely than most to have this odd experience. Even if we were extremely high-achieving undergraduates, we were still students. We weren't expected to be like our lecturers, those vaguely mythical people who seemed to know absolutely everything about their subjects. And we probably felt quite good about ourselves as learners. 

Then day one of our PhD programmes arrives, and out of nowhere we're doctoral candidates with staff status, often teaching other students (who think we're vaguely mythical people who know everything), and generally expected to know what we're on about. During the first week of my PhD this caused some quite extreme panic. All I knew was that I knew nothing, and would never know enough to write a thesis. I was an imposter. Worse, at some point everyone would find me out - probably in a grand unveiling during my upgrade viva, in a hall full of all my peers, when I would stand up to present and someone would object from the back that "This woman is NOT OF PHD STANDARD!”

Fortunately, this feeling has lessened over the past few months, as I've settled into my PhD. I've learned some helpful things, such as that I don't have to know everything about a subject to write a thesis, that I have a supervisor, and that there is a library on campus where I can go and look things up. It's a relief to realise that we will always be learning, both during and after our PhDs, and will probably never be the ultimate experts in anything. 

 But I still have that odd, nagging feeling occasionally. OK, about once a week.

 Do you experience imposter syndrome? What do you do about it?

I didn’t actually plan to write a post on this topic, but I have succumbed to the subtle nudges following Sarah’s post on keeping it in the family. My father said all those years ago that he didn’t feel a British doctorate was as valuable as a Dutch one. Why? The following are my guesses and are really meant as a starting point for discussion! Do people know of situations in other countries as I am only comparing to that in the Netherlands?

1. It only lasts three years! How can it be as thorough as a degree that takes at least 4 years?
2.  In the sciences, people are eligible to enter their UK doctoral degree with much less research experience than their Dutch counterparts, who will have done a year’s research project during their undergraduate (equivalent to MSc)
3. Postgraduate researchers are students in the UK, but members of staff in most of Europe, with pension schemes, maternity pay etc.
4.  Related to the last two points, he perceived UK doctoral candidates to be more closely supervised and less autonomous
5.  There is no requirement to publish any of your research in peer reviewed journals to gain your degree in the UK(instead you are required to make a contribution to knowledge)
6. In Holland theses are printed and bound in an A5 format and handed out to lots of people.
7. The British viva is a low key affair- it is really between you and your two examiners, generally without scrutiny. In the Netherlands it is a ceremonious occasion (I would argue this somewhat undermines its rigour), after the thesis has passed a ‘reading committee’ of several internal and external examiners. During the ceremony the candidate is flanked by two helpers (paranymphs) who in theory are allowed to help answer questions but in practice act much as bridesmaids/ best men. One of their duties is to help organise the party afterwards, which is on a similar scale to weddings! (Dutch PGRs are expected to start saving for this and the cost of printing the thesis from the start)
8. One of the Dutch requirements is a list of theses (stellingen). These are very wide ranging and ideally show off the wit of the candidate (although there are always some relating to the actual research). Tangential ones I can remember off the top of my head and bear translation are along the lines of ‘It is doubtful that Bax, Max and Zax choose to publish in JACS for purely scientific reasons’ or ‘a true gentleman can open even a revolving door for a lady’.
9. Revenge. After my teenage taunts that Chemistry was a more rigorous science than woolly Biology he might well just have been getting his own back…

Personally speaking during my doctoral training, winter season isn't the best motivator to get you out into the cold and into the lab or office to get some work going. Especially in Manchester when winter spells rain almost 4 out of 5 working days.

To put things into perspective, when Christmas is just around the corner and colleagues are talking about family gatherings, travelling back home, Christmas dinners, holidays abroad and most facilities are advertising the shut-down dates for this annual occassion. What about your supervisor? Does he/she rub the winter bug syndrom in? Perhaps not or perhaps with greeting cards making the rounds in the office, it does feel like a paid holiday just checking into work the week or two before Christmas.

As postgraduate researchers, we too feel the need for a break and this season adds all the more reason for it. However as international students we do feel the pinch in the pocket when we think about the flight/train tickets and not being able to be home for the Christmas break. Do what do we do when the city freezes up and the labs/unis shut down till early Jan?

Been there and done that and here was what some of us PGRs did during the Christmas winter break:

1. Choose to get into lab and braze the cold with layers or clothes since heating too will be turned off.

2. Plan a weekend/weeks trip to the EU and stay at youth hostels. Of course funds permitting.

3. Join the International Society and get into the mood of the season.

4. If you stay in a hall of residence then plan a Christmas Party/luncheon and do it pot luck style.

5. Since there is snow - build a snowman or an igloo with friends!

6. Visit the Christmas Markets or go for a Christmas Church Service.

7. Look forward to the 26th December Boxing Day Sale!

8. Write up that literature review or research paper which was lying on the desktop for ages now.

9. Sign up for HOST UK early to experience a whole new Bristish Christmas Culture with a British family too!

10. Do a round of pub visits with colleagues and friends each night till the hols ends.

So how did you spend your Christmas Hols this year as a PGR at home or away from home?

Experience the culture!

There are 22 universities in South Africa, with a ‘top tier’ of five, of which one, University of Cape Town is in the ‘top 100’. Universities are divided into general, comprehensive and technological universities. In 2007 there were 1274 doctoral graduates (in the UK there were 14 500, for reference). The distribution of people over the different disciplines is different from in the UK:  the largest proportion of these were in social sciences, especially education, followed by what we call biological sciences, then the humanities, then health and the number of engineers and physical scientists is  in double figures only. The average age of people finishing their doctorate is just over 40, which is quite a bit older than in the UK.

Politicians have decided to increase the number of doctoral graduates five-fold in the next few years as a way to contribute to making their economy more knowledge intensive. There have been a lot of discussions these last few days about the educational pipeline into the PhD. There are a lot of problems with the education system in South Africa which depletes the potential pool of graduates. Arguably, this needs to be sorted out first….

There are concerns over the demographics of academics, as only a third have doctorates (limiting the number of potential doctoral supervisors) and in general they are ageing, white males…

The funding agencies have created postdoctoral fellowships, which they are finding hard to fill. I think this is partly due to the relatively low remuneration and other conditions: Postdocs are generally regarded as students, meaning that on the one hand they don’t pay tax but it also means they don’t necessarily have access to staff development and other opportunities. The status means they can’t do teaching/ lecturing or supervision of PhD students.

These are some headline findings of my trip so far, I’ll try to post some more…

I have blogged about this festive time in years before, praising the community building qualities of carol singing. I’ve just been on our annual family outing to the pantomime: this year it was ‘Snow White and the seven dwarfs’ but that hardly really matters, does it, the ingredients remain the same: a princess, a handsome prince (sadly played by a boy-band singer rather than a girl in hotpants), a glittering baddie, a cross-dressed dame, a silly sidekick and some dancers. I apologise to those not versed in the British tradition of Panto as this will make no sense. It made me wonder if I could draw some parallels between research and pantomime.

The most famous phrase in all of pantomime ‘Oh yes it is- oh no it isn’t’ (competing only with ‘it’s behind you’). Surely this is critical thinking personified- the characters look for proof rather than taking the entire audience’s word for an assertion of someone being behind them….

Predictable format- just like our research papers? A sing- along with the audience bit rather than materials and methods. The solo songs are as predictable as an introduction and the dances as required as a discussion? With the inevitable wedding as the conclusion, perhaps. As we frequent pantomimes in both Cambridge and Southport we have noticed regional variations which I here venture mirrors the differences in conventions in different disciplines.

One regional difference is a scene which is a dead cert in one location but missing in another (I’d be interested to know if it occurs in your local pantomime…). In it the dame(s), the stupid sidekick and one other character-depending on the story- get lost  and beset by ghosts. The tagline is ‘We’ll have to do it again then won’t we’ before they repeat their routine…. Anyway, this is obviously all about repeating your experiments to make sure the results are reproducible, right (N tends to be 3 in pantos…) ?

Famous names on the poster- stars of telly (and 90s boy bands) get roped in to ensure drawing in the crowds. Is there a parallel here with famous names making it more likely that a paper gets accepted by high ranking journals?

There will be references to popular culture throughout, not too unlike the use of references in our papers?

Anyway, I might be reading too much into it all or not switching off from work enough…..

Merry Christmas everyone!

The evening was organised by Cambridge Businesswomen’s Network and Cambridge AWiSE, the association for women in science and engineering in Cambridge, which I take active part in.

Professor Dame Sandra Dawson is a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, professor of Management Studies at Judge Business School (which she pretty much founded and led for 10 years), and was the first female Master of Sidney Sussex College. She has previously worked in the civil service and as a researcher, lecturer and professor at Imperial College. She is now non-executive director of the UK Financial Services Authority as well as Oxfam.

So did she have any insights into leadership? There were plenty, but here are my favourite 9….

1.      Do things that really interests you and you are really good at. Adore what you do while you’re doing it and adore not doing it when you’ve stopped

2.      You don’t need a strict a plan to stick to but take opportunities that come along

3.      A lot of decision making and getting things to happen come through committees and boards- learn how these work by joining smaller ones, such as local charities or sports clubs (or research staff associations and committees in your institution)

4.      Don’t get too ‘tram-tracked’- explore the relationships and interfaces between subjects (although Sandra acknowledges academics these days need to ‘tunnel’ their interests while they get established because of the overriding importance attached to REF, publications etc, which she thought was a shame as she had enjoyed an ‘eclectic’ start to her research career)

5.      Difficult things, like saying ‘no’, become easier after you’ve done them a few times

6.      Gravitas is something that can be learned and comes with experience

7.      Get mentors, however informally. As senior people can be scared off by the time commitment involved in mentoring someone, ask someone you admire for a defined number of meetings, say two or three and make the most of these, rather than an open ended supportive relationship

8.      Always assume a solution can be found and work to find it

9.      Sandra is passionate about embracing diversity as it brings different views round a table and gets people to ask questions that really matter.

Has anyone else heard inspirational speakers recently and fancy sharing their insights?

We would argue that leadership is much wider than being an academic, political or corporate leader.  One way of thinking about leadership is as a good way to make use of your high level skills (the ones you are honing doing doctoral research!). It is when you influence and inspire people, get things done and make the most of your skills….

It’s not about academic leadership alone, although many readers of this blog may well aspire to that.

If you are thinking about academic leadership, check out the survey being conducted by the Leadership Foundation in Higher Education. It focuses on professors and is called ‘Leading Professors: examining the perspectives of ‘the led’ in relation to professorial leadership’. The survey still open- put in your views!  An article in Times Higher Education has predictably taken a bit of a negative view on the preliminary outcomes of the survey…. But what do you think? I personally feel that seeing only professors as leaders is quite narrow. For example, in research institutes leaders do not tend to have professors titles but are no less inspirational leaders for it.

Check out the Vitae pages on Leadership development to access the resources and find out about regional Leadership in Action courses coming up!

Discuss what leadership means to you, either here or on twitter- check out all the activity on the following hashtags: #vitae11 and # LiA11 (I am tennievideler on Twitter if you want to follow me- or Vitae_news  is the official Vitae twitter account).

There is an overall prize as well as specific prizes for Biological and Biomedical Science; Physical Sciences (Chemistry and Physics); and Engineering. These will be awarded to the scientific posters presented in each discipline which best communicate high level science to the lay audience.

The best sixty posters will be exhibited in the House of Commons on Monday 12 March 2012 during National Science and Engineering Week and there is a top prize of £3000 to be won in each category.

This is an excellent opportunity for young researchers to make the importance of their research known to a wider audience.

The deadline for online submissions is 24 December 2011.

More information about the competition and how to submit a poster can be found on the SET for Britain website:

http://www.setforbritain.org.uk/

A previous participants said of the competition, ”Attending SET for BRITAIN gave me the opportunity to see some of the top research conducted in the UK. But also, it allowed me to speak about our research and listen to other perspectives. It is an experience to remember.”

Shane surveyed about 50 postdocs in one of the departments at Imperial about their career aspirations and their expectations.  He found that most of them—both men and women—aspired to stay in academia, but far fewer expected to achieve the next step up and become lecturers.  Imperial has a strong and well-funded career planning programme for postdocs, but even so only about half of them actually said they had a career plan.

Shane also broke down the results by gender and by time in post, and this yielded some really interesting findings.  Although both men and women broadly preferred the idea of a lectureship, women were much less likely to expect to get one, and more of them expected to go into industry.  In addition, women were much more likely than men to have a career plan.

The longer people had been working as postdocs the more they wanted a lectureship—but after about four years in the job their expectations began to fall, suggesting that there might be a kind of ‘golden window’ around that time—if you don’t manage to make the leap to lectureship at that point, then your chances of doing so diminish with every passing year.

At the same time Shane and his team surveyed PIs to ask where their last five postdocs had gone.   They found that twice as many men as women had gone into lectureships—although the numbers involved were small.  Women’s destinations were broader, and they were more likely to leave academia.

The research raises lots of intriguing questions.  Is it true that there is a promotion window that gradually closes at four years or so—or is it just a researchers’ urban myth?  Do women’s lower expectations for academic career progression reflect lingering machismo in science departments—or are they just more realistic?  

Intriguingly, someone said that in certain fields of science women face a decision in their mid-30s: whether to stop working with particular chemicals or processes in order to protect their fertility.  It's something that I, as a social science researcher, have never had to consider.

• researchers' careers and mobility,
• research infrastructures,
• cross-border operation of research actors,
• knowledge circulation,
• International cooperation and
• cross-cutting governance issues.