Tell IGDORE and the OS&A forum about your academic achievement of 2020

Academia
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Hi everyone :blush: Thanks Gavin for prompting me to post on this forum.

2020 has been a very busy academic year for me. What I am most proud of is being able to connect with and collaborate with some of the most amazing and dedicated researchers/academics from all over the world (USA, Canada, Australia, Africa, India, Europe and other countries) I have ever met in my life. I really appreciate Rebeccaā€™s and Gavinā€™s support towards my research involvement.

I have been involved in several projects related to Covid-19 among Black, Asians and Minority Ethnic communities globally, and one of the first researchers to support and highlight concerns to policy-makers.

I was invited by a local radio station to discuss my research about Covid19.

I started an international consortium with over 40 multi-disciplinary researchers www.covid19ecrc.com

I have collaborated with other researchers and contributed to research papers, a book chapter and other research related activities that hopefully I will shed some light on for the New Year.

Together with other researchers/academics, I have organised an international mini-conference showcasing some of our ongoing research studies.

And the icing on the cake is being able to personally meet and interview participants affected by Covid19 from all over the world to hear about their experiences. I look forward to 2021!

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Hi there

I am new to this forum although been accepted by IGDORE as one of the researchers in training since July 2020. This year I spent most of my time at home, parenting, working and completing my MBA dissertation. After my MSc award back in 2012, I decided to take up MBA to expand onto management and business industry, while I am hoping to get involved in academic and research work as my side project. I am fortunate that I had my business dissertation completed in time despite the problem of traveling restriction. Moreover, two publications were published from this business dissertation, with one of them was affiliated with IGDORE. My December 2020 ended with an award of MBA degree.

I also worked on three research grant proposals, submitted for grant assessment by local research council. Hopefully that will be some good news from them. I also started accepted invitation to review some journal articles, by double blinding.

On the other hand, I also worked on my business, writing and manage my full time job as clinical project manager. I would say that 2020 is definitely a year to give me more time for planning and executing, which turn out to be more productive for me. In 2021, I am looking forward to combine my capabilities in promoting public awareness about open science and clinical research; as well as hoping can land a job as uni lecturer/researcher, be it part time, contract or full time.

I felt really honored to be able to join this research and academician group. Indeed, your contribution and participation have inspired me to do more and contribute more to science, education and related industry.

Wish you all in good health and well. Together we will do better in 2021.

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Forwarding from @dasaptaerwin

Thank you for reminding me to post something on this forum. Iā€™ve been following the messages from everyone. Thank you all for sharing your positive energy in this forum.

Yes I did present a geoscience-related picture in IOI forum, as I see that many of publishers attended the forum, and one of them was Will Gunn :). Stefaniia also presented in the same forum, but I didnā€™t attend because of the time difference.

I need to remind them that the publishing industry has changed the ā€œmagnetic fieldsā€ of the earth especially to the eyes of Indonesia research ecosystem (if not the world). I said that the magnetic poles are now university ranking and commercial publisher as the most important entry point. As the impact, Indonesian officials keep buying commercial services instead of creating one themselves using everything that they have and can do. This is where the second picture comes in. We do more purchasing and less creation, in a situation that we have all the skills, knowledge, and funding (relatively big for Indonesia) to create something. Indonesian research and higher education ministries (under the new administration, the ministry have been split in to two, Ministry of research and tech/BRIN and Ministry of Education and Culture) have spent thousands of dollars to pay for indexing services for scientific quality measurement and database subscription for access where it could have been spent for the tuition of thousands of students for four years.

In short we could say that academic culture has left the building :). Itā€™s another picture.

Then yesterday, Indonesia Open Science Team submitted a policy brief on scientific reform to the Directorate General of Higher Education (Prof. Nizam). He is the 2nd layer official under the Ministry of Education and Culture. The brief was the planned output from our limited meeting with Prof. Nizam on 24th of November 2020 (Surya also attended, even moderated the event). In the doc we explain that early exposure to (open) science via systematic education is important. We also point out that thereā€™s no other way to measure academic impact than to dig in the work, read it and assess its transparency and credibility. Here we introduce Curate Science as one example of real platform doing some real assessment. Etienne leads the project. Surya and I will follow up our plan to adapt (or use) Curate Science to setup an alternative assessment platform. Today Indonesia has SINTA that uses mainstream metric to assess academic papers and staffs.

So actually I am sharing a sad story along with the positive energy :). Happy holiday to all of you and wishing you safety and health where ever you are.

Greetings from Indonesia.

Dasapta

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Forwarding from @marilia

Sure! Indeed, we (the Ronin Institue + me) published the book ā€œSuicide and lifting: issues on prevention and postventionā€ on September the 10th, International Suicide Prevention day and the last year of the WHO Mental Health 7-year program. We made if for free download and itā€™s available below:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344193731_Suicide_and_lifting_-_Issues_in_prevention_and_postvention

Last weekend I presented a paper at the ISHPSSB 2020 off-year Symposium (International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology). Iā€™m attaching the book of abstracts where you can find all papers presented there, including mine*.

It was a great experience and we were able to explore how the school environment deserves special attention in terms of gatekeeper education given the suicide spike in several teenager communities.

We are now exploring how the findings from this research could be applied to other vulnerable communities, particularly incarcerated minorities and neighborhoods.

Finally, weā€™re very happy with this academic Open Source format. As Thomas Picketty so appropriately pointed out concerning his exceptionally successful recent book, academic/technical books represent a dilemma:

  • they are expensive to produce because of the small audience/number of copies
  • the author rarely makes any money. Itā€™s not unusual that the author and/or their institution ends up paying for some of the book production cost
  • students and other audience groups donā€™t have the money to purchase the book. It happened with one of my last books, beautifully produced but it ended up so expensive that my students couldnā€™t buy it.

My option from now on is this alternative format. I intend to publish an article about alternative academic publication formats based on this experience. Iā€™m actually preparing a new book and shopping for colleagues to review the manuscript (and obviously getting the credit for that). It will not be double-blind, of course but thatā€™s also something under debate for academic book publishing.

Iā€™m also preparing to submit a grant proposal with the Open Society Foundations and although 2020 has been a horrible year, for me and several other ā€œindiesā€, as Amanda Hastings calls us, it opened some interesting options.

Cheers!

*Ooopsā€¦ the book of abstracts was too big to upload. Here is my abstract:

Suicide: failures in interdisciplinarity, in co-production of knowledge with lived-experience movements, in prevention and postvention as associated phenomena

Marilia Coutinho Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship USA

Suicide is a multi-disciplinary subject where interdisciplinary research and practice are still insufficient. It is also a complex social phenomenon reflecting violent power relations and social pathologies as well as a set of individual pathological conditions associated with the same societal determinants. As a study subject, it lies at the intersection of many disciplines: sociology, psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, neural and evolutionary biology, law, toxicology, urban planning, political science, and management, to name a few. The more we investigate the microphysics of suicide, the less universal the proposed models appear to be, and the more diverse its manifestations. The recent rise in suicide rates in previously low-risk populations suggest that Academiaā€™s inability to cross-talk and solve problems in an interdisciplinary manner has deadly consequences. Suicide is also a subject in which, unless knowledge from lived-experience movements is incorporated into a co-production framework, little advance can be expected in policy-making. In this work, through a critical review of interdisciplinarity and co-production of knowledge failures, and a case study of prevention failure in the strength sports as compared to other sports, I argue that by not actively engaging in interdisciplinary work, we end up not even agreeing about the definition of suicide, let alone how to positively intervene on the mental suffering leading to it. Unless these limitations are mitigated, suicide prevention and postvention have little chance of success. The main bottleneck for cross-talk engagement ā€“ across disciplines, among stakeholders, and with the acknowledgment of lived-experience movements as protagonists and privileged interlocutors in the conversation ā€“ is mainstream psychiatry and its ā€œhard scienceā€ ally, neurobiology. Through an absolute focus on the individual (end-result) manifestation of mental suffering, to the exclusion or rampant minimization of social pathologies and social determinants, the ā€œbiologizationā€ of suicide silences or trivializes other voices.

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@Gavin, thanks for emailing (reminding) me to post on this forum.

Iā€™ve been doing academic and non-academic activities in the recent few years, then I may not have something considered as academic achievement, but at least I feel content with them.

Since a few years ago, I had remotely supervised a junior researcher in Indonesia who has a Math background and wanted to do climate research. I was happy that she finally published her work in an international journal in January 2020 where I was a co-author. Thanks for her hard work.

A few years ago, I was one of the advisors of a PhD student in Singapore, and he graduated in 2019. At that time, he still had one incomplete part that we continued our discussion remotely. And, this year he has completed and submitted the work in an international journal where I was a co-author. Now, itā€™s still under review. Iā€™m proud of him. I hope the work would be accepted for publication next year.

At the end of this year, Iā€™ve finally finished analyzing data and writing a paper on climate change mechanism and impacts on tropics. It is ready for submission where Iā€™m the first author. Itā€™s a collaborative work with overseas colleagues. Now, my colleague, who is also a co-author, is processing it to get his institutionā€™s approval for paying the publication fee. If everything works well, we expect to submit it soon at the beginning of next year.

This year, Iā€™ve tried a new side activity as a (freelance) research consultant. It could be not so ā€œwowā€, but I was so excited to have first two clients. I provided consultancy on data analysis and paper writing, such as analyzing their data, interpreting the graphs they have, choosing the best plots to show, etc. What I felt more excited about is, the clients have different academic backgrounds from me. Itā€™s pleasant to get to know something new and support others as needed. This little new experience has broken my fears in helping others from other fields and has given me a different perspective on consultancy.

Have a good holiday break, and I wish for brighter days in 2021 for everyone!

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Hey everyone! Despite all the sh*tstorm we had, I had lots of good ā€œworkā€ things happening this year. I recall one of the papers we published this year: Machado et al (2020). Happy New Year everyone, hope 2021 will be an awesome year for all of us!

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Hi all, many thanks to @Gavin for initiating this discussion and best New Yearā€™s wishes to all of you! I hope that you have all had a good holiday and have managed to evade COVID wherever you are (!). The UK where I am based has been eerily unfestive for the end of 2020 since the new mutated variant down south in London caused a lot of mass panic and we are now set for another nationwide lockdown (third in eight months!). 2020 has been a chaotic year for all of us but I am delighted to read that we all made progress last year in our respective lives and careers and letā€™s hope that 2021 runs more smoothly than last, which it absolutely must (!). On my end, I have had the following peer-reviewed papers published in well-respected journals and a couple more in the pipeline for early publication in 2021:

Tse, K. (2020): ā€˜Differential Object Marking: Nominal and Verbal Parametersā€™, in Farrell, P. (ed), Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting, 2nd-5th January 2020, Volume 5, No. 1, pp. 670-684.

Tse, K. (2020): ā€˜Book Review on Elly van Gelderen (ed), Cyclical Change Continued (2016)ā€™. Journal of Historical Linguistics, Volume 10, Issue 1, pp. 136-142.

The global pandemic has caused disruptions to our every walk of life, though it has been reassuring that most academic conferences have taken place online in a virtual format. Apart from vastly expanding conference attendance to people all over the world who no longer have to worry about travelling and accommodation costs, it has also been possible to record our conference presentations for redistribution and citation. In my case, I have had three conference presentations uploaded on Vimeo and YouTube:

ā€˜Differential Object Marking and Event Structure: Perspectives from Romance ad and Chinese baā€™. Presented at the Oxford Workshop on Events and Event Structure at the Limits of Grammar (EESLiG2020), 16th September 2020.

ā€˜What is D in Romance DOM?ā€™ Presented at the Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (HLL) Colloquium, 11th September 2020.

ā€˜Sinitic nominalisation: microvariation and dialect levelling (ę¼¢čŖžę–¹čØ€åč©žåŒ–ēš„參ę•øå’ŒęŽ„č§ø)ā€™. Presented at the 24th International Conference on Yue Dialects (ē¬¬äŗŒåå››å±Šåœ‹éš›ē²µę–¹č؀ē ”čØŽęœƒ), 13th November 2020.

I have been invited to present at a few more (virtual) conferences in 2021 and I shall hope to record those too and build my online portfolio. 2020 has been a roller-coaster for all of us and there have been many missed opportunities for us young and ambitious researchers. Letā€™s hope that the global recovery effort begins as soon as possible with as few disruptions and setbacks as possible so that we can all make up for lost grounds and more. Best wishes for the New Year and please keep in touch!

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Thanks to everybody who shared their research stories over the last month. Itā€™s been a blast to see what everybody accomplished during 2020 :clap: As promised, all the achievements were in the last IGDORE newsletter. (@alexandrejaguar and @keithtse, you were a little bit late on the newsletter deadline, but Iā€™ll add your achievements to the January newsletter :slight_smile: )

EDIT: It seems a few more people are posting, so Iā€™ll add all new posts that come in before January 30th to the next newsletter. But thatā€™s the final encore :stuck_out_tongue:

For anybody who hasnā€™t posted yet, please feel free to your story whenever youā€™d like. Maybe we can do this again in 12 months to reflect on how 2021 goes - hopefully, there will be even more good news to celebrate!

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Thanks @gavin - and sorry to be late to the party, though not sorry because I really needed the break. I think Iā€™m most proud of the Rapid Response e-books on ā€˜Researching In The Age Of COVID-19ā€™ which I co-edited with Su-ming Khoo from the National University of Ireland for Policy Press. We thought we might get 15 good submissions - we got over 100 submissions from all around the world, and most of them were good ones! In five months flat, from call for chapters to publication, we produced three e-books, each with 11 chapters and a low price: Response and Reassessment, Care and Resilience, and Creativity and Ethics. These have provided insights and ideas for researchers struggling to figure out how to do their work during a pandemic. Weā€™ve had great feedback - but the credit should really go to our authors, who were so responsive; they all understood the urgency of getting these e-books out fast, produced fantastic material, and were wonderfully attentive to our deadlines and emails.

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I could spend all day hearing your struggle with eu copyright laws. :slight_smile:

Am struggling with copyright battle too these days. :slight_smile:

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Congratsā€¦ Have shared the bookā€™s description with othersā€¦ :slight_smile:

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What an achievement! Have shared the website on my whatsapp groupsā€¦ :slight_smile:

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Great larissa! Sorry havenā€™t been able to reply your email as i was moving from medan to jakarta en route to singapore. Soon, i hope. :slight_smile:

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Well in the recenty released movie WE CAN BE HEROES, children are the leaders. How about that? :slight_smile:

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Thanks @Gavin for this thread, and to everyone for sharing your stories and achievements! Itā€™s wonderful to celebrate and rejoice together.

I am also quite new to this community, having recently joined thanks to @Enrico.Fucci, and feeling grateful to be here with you.

My last year had three highlights: first, a paper was published in August 2020 to which I have modestly contributed as a co-author (alas, not yet with an IGDORE affiliation): The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approach. This collaborative paper with 47 co-authors was initiated through the first Open Innovation in Science (OIS) conference 2019 in Vienna, Austria, which I also attended. (The second OIS research conference 2021 is currently scheduled for April 7-9, 20201 at CERN IdeaSquare in Geneva, Switzerland; Iā€™ll open a separate thread for that, and I hope some of you can join too!)

Second, and personally most gratifying: after volunteering to support the hosting and community-building team at an online conference-retreat event, the ā€œEuropean Summer Research Instituteā€ by Mind & Life Europe, I gathered a group of contemplative researchers who share (1) a deep dissatisfaction with contemporary academia, as well as (2) hopeful aspirations to create a better academic culture. We started out by collaborating on an abstract for a 90ā€™ symposium at the bi-annual Mind & Life conference in November 2020, and in the course of this short but intense collaboration, the name ā€œMindful Researchersā€ emerged for us. While our symposium abstract got turned down, we were offered a 15ā€™ paper presentation instead, which I gave on behalf of our group. In the course of these and other shared activities, our group slowly accumulated members; and a few weeks ago, again thanks to @Enrico.Fucci, we found a new ā€œhomeā€ for our conversations here on this forum! About 20 of us have already registered, and I look forward to lively and fruitful exchanges.

The third highlight for me was one of our Mindful Researchers activities in December: @AnniLou and I co-facilitated a ā€œListening Circleā€, in which 13 researchers connected their very personal inquiries of being a researcher with the ancient practice of circle-based storytelling. This proved to be a deeply meaningful experience for our participants, and we intend to continue and develop it further during this year.

These developments are the beginning of a ā€œdream come trueā€ for me. I have long theorized about what it might take to build a dedicated community of genuinely collaborating Mindful Researchers, and to ā€œtransform academia from withinā€. Now this aspiration actually seems to slowly become manifest - but I want to be modest and say that weā€™ve just begun to take a couple of steps. More steps and leaps to follow for sure! This means a lot of work, is very slow-paced, and does not pay any money (though I hope we may get funding e.g. through grants), but I love it with all my heart. And such heart is needed, I believe, alongside all the benefits that rigorous research can afford us.

Thanks again for this wonderful opportunity to share!

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Everywhere democracy is in flux. Congrats and keep it up. :slight_smile:

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Hi! My last year was little productive in science. However, finally I finished a Master (I had to make a dissertation) and I started a website about auditory cortex with technology. The idea (long-time) is make a technologic lab of research about the central auditory cortex. At the moment is only a website but I hope training in software and making my PhD to working as a researcher.

Iā€™m still defining the web, so if you have any suggestion or you see there is something wrong, please write me through the contact form on the website.

The web is: https://www.auditorycortex.es

Iā€™m having some problems with the mobile configuration (responsive) but you can see it through your laptop (any help to fix this is welcome).

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@sam.williams mailed me to mention a few papers he was happy to get published last year

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Happy to share my last article published about states of emergency in response to covid-19 in South Africa with IGDORE affiliation. ā€˜South African Opposition Party Behaviour Under the National State of Disaster to Respond to the Covid-19 Pandemicā€™

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thanks for thisā€¦ the kind of paper i like discussingā€¦ meta-politics, no? :slight_smile: