Blogs

Career issues were fairly prominent on Nature Network this week. Wilson Pok contributed an excellent post about the difficulties faced by PhD researchers pursuing postdoc positions, prompted by a recent careers seminar:

Some speakers spoke of how they got to where they are now. One professor seemed to have just gotten lucky by being in the same lab at the same time as a professor who won a Nobel prize. Another speaker spoke of how unstable the postdoc life is, where you’re barely settled into one postion (often after having moved overseas) before you have to start working on applying for the next one.

Massimo Pinto, returning to Nature Network after a long absence, had a completely contradictory experience. He and 140 other Italian researchers were offered tenured positions completely out of the blue:

On a Saturday morning, the postman rang the bell. Minutes later, I was in tears. I got a tenured position. I read the letter agan, and again. I now had to resign from my post, sign my new contract, and take office at my new workplace immediately.

Sounds almost too good to be true. Find out why this happened, and more on the strange state of science in Italy, on Massimo’s blog.

Elsewhere, Stephen Curry criticises a price hike in the cost of NPG journals, Frank Norman provides a potted history of reference managers, Lauren Blair realises she’s in a minority group in her own country, while Jenny Rohn gets the feeling she’s being watched in the lab.

Forums

Nature and the Royal Society are co-hosting a conference on 1 July focused on the future of UK science. The Tomorrow’s Giants meeting will look in particular at the career development of researchers, the metrics and indicators used to measure research success, and the issues surround sharing and privacy of data. If you have strong views on any of these areas, please comment on the Tomorrow’s Giants forum. Your opinions may be raised by panel members in an afternoon debate at the conference.

And a further reminder that Science Online London 2010 will take place at the British Library on 3-4 September. The conference brings together all those interested in scientific communication and collaboration online. The conference now has a Nature Network forum where you can suggest sessions and speakers, and ask questions.

And finally…

Congratulations to Elizabeth Moritz, whose Nature Network blog PhD to Be is now, happily, something of a misnomer.