The scientific workplace in 2023
India’s first Moon landing and a welcome return to Horizon Europe for UK researchers loomed large in an eventful year for working scientists around the world
In a year of great scientific progress and discovery, researchers around the world dealt with a wide range of issues — financial, political, social and otherwise — that affected their ability to do their work.
As cost-of-living pressures continued to rise and many governments cut funding for science, researchers organized and protested in response. The year will be remembered for the explosive rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), but it was also a year of backtracking on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and net-zero carbon commitments. Geopolitical tensions continue in many parts of the world, including the war between Russia and Ukraine, conflict triggered by Hamas attacks on Israel in October and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission reached the Moon and the United Kingdom rejoined Horizon Europe, the European Union’s €95-billion (US$102-billion) research programme, after a two-year hiatus.
Here is a collection of some of the top stories that, taken together, paint a picture of the scientific workplace in 2023, including steps that researchers took to advocate for themselves and their profession.
Speaking out, taking action
Nature’s second global survey of postdoctoral researchers revealed deep, ongoing concerns about pay, working conditions and career development, findings that amplified calls for reform. A separate survey of postdocs conducted by the US National Postdoctoral Association confirmed widespread dissatisfaction with working conditions and job prospects, with almost 95% of the 366 respondents saying low pay was negatively affecting their personal and professional lives.
Postdocs at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s main funder of biomedical and public-health research, warned that cost-of-living pressures are gutting its workforce, and thousands of early-career NIH researchers voted to unionize for the first time. In Canada, PhD students and postgraduates staged a mass walkout over low pay. Hundreds of researchers in Germany protested to call for improved working conditions for postdocs and others in academia.
In June, the issue of race-conscious university admissions went before the US Supreme Court.Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
In the United States, researchers at the University of California ended a historic strike. But research-group leaders around the country worried about how to pay for workers’ salary hikes.
Some fed-up early-career researchers have found a subtler way to express dissatisfaction through ‘quiet quitting’ — by no longer performing unpaid or under-appreciated tasks.
Research misconduct
Concerns about research integrity and how investigations are handled continued to overshadow the scientific enterprise. Ram Sasisekharan, a bioengineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is having to rebuild his team after a years-long probe that eventually cleared him of wrongdoing. Neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down as president of Stanford University in California amid criticism over lax oversight of his laboratory, a case that could offer lessons for other lab leaders. A US judge ruled that Charles Lieber would not have to face any extra prison time for lying about ties to China while working as a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In March, bioengineer Ram Sasisekharan was cleared of wrongdoing.Credit: Bryce Vickmark
Australia, a country that lacks an independent body to investigate scientific misconduct, started re-evaluating its system of oversight after several high-profile instances of scientific fraud. And with the advent of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, scientific sleuths have been working to spot its dishonest use in papers.
Axed funding
Scientists in many countries spoke out about government decisions and actions that threaten to undermine the research enterprise. Australia’s decision to slash funding for its Antarctica programme — an important source of climate-change data — was described as a ‘terrible blow for science’. The Japanese government drew criticism over a plan to privatize its influential science council. In Mexico, thousands of researchers protested against a new law that consolidated government control over the country’s science. And Swedish researchers decried their government’s decision to axe funding for research on international development. The Indian government’s decision to suspend foreign funding for the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research — an influential think tank — drew condemnation from international researchers, including many with a long history of collaboration with the centre. Many feared it could muzzle independent scrutiny of policy in India. Cochrane, a global independent network that champions evidence-based health care, battled UK funding cuts and closures.
Partnerships and tensions
Scientific collaboration across borders improved in some ways in 2023. The United Kingdom rejoined the Horizon Europe research programme, a move widely celebrated as a welcome sign of unity and progress following tensions triggered by the 2016 Brexit vote.
In another example of cooperation, the United States agreed an extension to a non-binding research pact with China, first signed in 1979 and renewed every five years since then. Some US lawmakers had said the agreement poses a threat to national security and called for it to be scrapped. A US State Department spokesperson said the six-month extension was agreed to amend and strengthen the deal.
But the two countries remain rivals. For the first time, China topped the United States as the leading producer of natural-science papers, as measured by the Nature Index database, which tracks research outputs published across 145 leading medical and natural-sciences journals.
The United Kingdom hosted a global summit on AI safety, one of the hallmark issues of 2023, drawing delegates from 27 nations and representatives from the technology industry.
Separately, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the country was delaying a ban on new petrol and diesel car sales from 2030 to 2035. A phase-out of new gas-fired boilers for heating homes by 2030 was pushed back by the same amount. The announcement followed one earlier in the year of new exploration licences for oil and gas companies. Also, a plan to expand capacity for offshore wind energy was put on hold. The NIH announced, and later upheld, a plan to more heavily scrutinize grants awarded to foreign scientists, a move that drew condemnation from many researchers.
Diversity challenges
Science continued to grapple with issues of diversity, a still-fraught topic marked by both progress and setbacks. Following a US Supreme Court decision, US universities moved to end ‘race-conscious’ admissions, a shift with implications for diversity on campus and ultimately in the scientific workforce. Moves by US universities to defund diversity programmes drew criticism from academics.
Scientists petitioned the University of California, Los Angeles, to reinstate ecologist Priyanga Amarasekare, who was suspended after speaking out about discrimination. Similarly, supporters of gender-equality researcher Susanne Täuber petitioned the University of Groningen in the Netherlands for her reinstatement — Täuber had been sacked after criticizing the university’s failure to follow its own equality policy.
After receiving much criticism for declining to include questions about sexual orientation on workforce surveys, the US National Science Foundation, the nation’s main federal research funder, announced plans to track sexual orientation and gender identity demographics when it releases its yearly census of all recipients of research doctorates at US institutions in 2024, pending the results of a pilot survey conducted in July 2023. The NIH also faced calls to make its policies and procedures more inclusive of people with disabilities by changing what critics see as its ‘ableist’ mission statement.
A study1 of more than one million papers published in more than 500 journals between 2001 and 2020 found signs of racial inequalities in publishing, including under-representation of members of minority ethnic groups on editorial boards, and lower citation rates and longer review periods for their papers compared with those by white authors. The largest-ever study2 of journal editors found a strong gender gap on editorial boards, with only 14% of journal editors being women and only 8% of editors-in-chief being women. But a third investigation3 found that women in some research fields are 3–15 times more likely than men with similar levels of citations and publications to be elected to prestigious US scientific academies.
Sexual harassment in the spotlight
Science’s ongoing reckoning with bullying, harassment and incidents of sexual assault incidents made some headlines. Joshua Tewksbury, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, described changes in protocols and culture that the institute made after incidents of harassment came to light. Researchers urged UK universities to improve their processes for handling allegations of sexual assault, and the University of Oxford took a step towards avoiding potential conflicts of interest and abuses of power by banning intimate relationships between students and staff.
Wins for science
Indian researchers had some reasons for optimism. The touchdown of the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s lander on the Moon was hailed as a landmark achievement for India and a great advance in international efforts to understand Earth’s nearest neighbour. Plans to create a billion-dollar National Research Foundation raised hopes that the country could boost research across its thousands of universities, colleges, institutes and laboratories.
In the United Kingdom, modifications to the country’s Research Excellence Framework were seen by many as a promising step towards better assessment of scientific productivity, but others warned that the changes could cause more problems than they solve. Researchers in Australia welcomed a move to limit the government’s power to veto grant approvals. And the European Union invested €10 million to address a ‘brain drain’ that has seen early-career scientists seeking jobs elsewhere.
The publishing landscape
Academic publishers continued to grapple with a shifting landscape and the growth of open-access publishing. Members of the editorial boards at the neuroscience journal NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports quit in protest at what they saw as high article-processing charges.
For scientists, simply trying to adhere to journal guidelines could be wasting millions of dollars’ worth of their time every year, an investigation4 suggested. Another study5 found that researchers who don’t speak fluent English get little help from journals. Scientists in Tanzania, however, were offered a direct yet controversial incentive by the government: a US$22,000 bonus if their work is published in international journals.
In August, the family of Henrietta Lacks reached a settlement over how her cells were used.Credit: Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty
Science, justice and conflict justice
Researchers in Sudan had to flee a violent military conflict that spilled over into hospitals and universities. Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza emptied labs, with many Israeli researchers called up for military service, and damaged university buildings in Gaza. In the United States, the NSF invested millions in an effort to unite Indigenous knowledge with Western science. And a ground-breaking settlement between the biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific and the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who had cells taken from her and used for research without consent more than 70 years ago, has implications for the use of human tissue in research. Stephen Sodeke, a bioethicist at Tuskegee University in Alabama, said that if a person consents to a surgical procedure, they should “have the legal right to decide whether to allow the use or not of cells derived” from it for research.
Whatever’s in store for science 2024, Nature will ensure that the scientific workplace receives the attention, scrutiny and coverage that it deserves.
Nature 624, 689-691 (2023)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-04030-1
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Chris Woolston
