 Hello, welcome to November's ECR Wednesday webinar hosted by Elife. This series aims to give early career researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. The session is being recorded and we'll make it available on YouTube in the near future. Now it's my pleasure to invite Carolina Kazada, a member of the Elife Early Career Advisory Group, to introduce today's session and our panelists. Thank you, Jane, and hello everyone. Thanks for joining our ECR Wednesday webinar discussing in pursuit of more equitable funding. My name is Carolina Kazada and I'm a member of the Elife Early Career Advisory Group. I will be moderating this webinar. Elife is a non-profit organization that is operating a platform to improve all aspects of research communication by encouraging and recognizing the most responsible behaviors in research. The role of the Early Career Advisory Group, ECAC, is to influence and support Elife's work to catalyze broad reform in the evaluation and communication of science, in particular to represent the needs and aspirations of researchers at early stages in their careers for a research culture that is healthy for science and for scientists. The ECR Wednesday webinar series is just one of the initiatives that Elife has launched to help support the ECR community. Today, our speakers will discuss the challenges faced by early career applicants and scientists from specific geographies or underrepresented communities when pursuing funding opportunities. We will also explore examples of funding policies and community initiatives that they think could help make funding fairer. The webinar will begin with the panelists sharing their stories. Then, in the second half of the webinar, we'll be putting your questions to them. To ask a question, you can type your question into the Zoom chat box or you can tweet us, we are at Elife Community, using ECR Wednesday hashtag. I would like to welcome all three speakers. We have with us Lotti de Vinde from Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands, Uwe Carignano from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina, Kate DeGrogan from the University of Cincinnati, USA. Thank you all so much for joining us today. And before opening the floor to our speakers, please follow us on Twitter at Elife Community and with the hashtag ECR Wednesday. Please be respectful, honest, inclusive, accommodating, appreciative and open to learning from everyone else. Do not attack, demean, disrupt, harass or threaten others or encourage such behavior. If you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome on any of these webinars, please contact Elife by email to eventsatelifeciences.org. This inbox is being watched by Anya Stars Elife. We reserve the right to ask anyone to leave and or to deny access to a subsequent webinar. If you need help, send a chat message directly to Elife staff, Anya Stars or chain us up. To ask questions, use the Zoom chat box and tweet at Elife Community ECR Wednesday at any point during the webinar. I will read out your name and question in the 15 minutes Q&A at the end of the webinar. Now to introduce our speakers. At first is Lotte de Binde, ICAC member and leading the Fair Funding Initiative within Elias Ambassador Program. Lotte will highlight key information and opportunities she and her peers recently summarized in a white paper entitled Towards Inclusive Funding Practices for Early Career Researchers. Please Lotte. Thank you Carolina and welcome everyone to this ECR Wednesday webinar. Next slide please. So as Carolina introduced me, I am Lotte de Binde and for the past two and a half years I have been leading one of the initiatives within the Elife Community Ambassadors Program. We call this the Fair Funding Initiative and our goal was to identify good practices in research funding policies which may benefit early career researchers and also to investigate problems within the current funding landscape that may help to get funding for ECRs to get funding. So we recently wrote all our investigations and discussions in this preprint which is now available at OSF preprints and herewith I would also like to thank all the co-authors for all their hard work and the good and nice discussions we had over the past two years. So now I would like to summarize for you our findings, our discussions and also to give you some ideas of what you could do. Next slide please. So first of all, why is it important for early career researchers to obtain research funding? We are of course as early career researchers we're quite a broad group so this may be less important or far at the horizon for you when you are starting PhD students. However, when you progress through your academic career and you become a senior PhD or final year PhD student postdoc or even when you really want to make this transition towards an early career PI, Principal Investigator, it's really important to obtain research funding because it will show your independence within academia so it shows you are building your research focus into new questions and new ideas and also research actually has shown that it's not a prerequisite to have obtained independent research funding to obtain a faculty position. However, it turned out from a study in the USA that was actually turned out to be an advantage to have obtained a research funding if you were applying for a faculty position. So and that's probably due to the things I just said about that you show that you have independence and you can develop your own research ideas. So to progress in an academic career it's really important to obtain research funding. Next slide please. However, unfortunately it's also very difficult for ECRs to obtain research funding and some of the hurdles that we've identified is that actually there has been over the last few years a global decrease in research funding in almost all countries are investing less in research funding at least compared to the number of researchers. Maybe they're becoming more researchers and also the age of which starting PIs get their own research funding and can actually start their own research group has actually increased. Also as a postdoc and I, I'm also speaking from my own experience, postdocs are often put on very short term contracts for maybe two, three years and nowadays it's quite difficult to get this really solid story published within those two, three years and then also develop your own research idea away from your main supervisor. So actually this whole process takes a couple more years and therefore you end up doing multiple postdoctoral positions. Then also ECRs face poor mentorship, challenges in publishing, restrictive grant funding criteria. I will come to that later and unfortunately also biases in grant review and then if you have applied for grants and you get a negative result, there is often a lack of feedback and transparency to learn from this person and to know where you need to improve your research proposal or maybe your CV. And most importantly I think this is not really a general, some of these things may apply to some of us but not to all of us. There's really a difference. For example, if you're a woman you will have less chances of obtaining research funding and also if you are from a country with less research funding or less well-known or if you have done a PhD or a postdoc in a less known laboratory, these are all things that really influence if you become successful in obtaining research funding. Next slide please. So already here I come to our recommendations and I don't have enough time to go into detail for all of them but you can read more in our pre-print. But it's really important for an early career researcher is of course the number of funding opportunities and if those funding opportunities are really for your specialism or your stage in your career. Maybe you are thinking about starting a family or maybe you already have kids. So you also think it's important if parental leave is taken into consideration and if that stops having, if that really means a break within your research funding or that you can maybe substitute that with a technician. Allegibility time, a lot of research, sorry, funding organizations at least in the UK for example have now, they don't look at your eligibility time so the time, number of years after your PhD that you can apply for a certain postdoctoral fellowship because everyone of us will have a different career and we will be ready to apply for the postdoctoral fellowship at a certain time. Nationality, especially in the US it turns out that for a lot of funding you need to be a US citizen especially PhD applications. So that's an important point and also scholarly outputs. I mean we all publish papers because that's our end result of our research. However, we also maybe make codes or we do public engagement or we do other things like being an E-Life ambassador so those are all things that are important for us as early career researchers as well. Well, and then we have proposed things that a funder can improve. Consider biases, I will come back to that later. Encourage co-applications of early career research on grants because that will show a little bit of independence and building research focus. Expand the citizenship criteria. Fund fundamental research, a lot of funding organizations and special charities which are linked to a certain disease are moving into funding more translational research. However, we need this fundamental research to then get new questions to feed this translational research. Preliminary applications can be really important because it will give you very quick results of if your research proposal or if you are at the right time in your career, parental leave, I've discussed that, encourage pre-prints, evaluate applicants on a need basis. Not because they're from a very famous laboratory which maybe is a very, very rich but actually because this research environment is less wealthy and therefore there is not a lot of resources. And then this removed time after PhD restrictions, I talked about that and also I will come back in detail about the use of alternative funding mechanisms. Next slide, please. So first biases. During our discussions we found that actually biases in grant review is maybe one of the biggest challenges that ECRs and actually a lot of minorities in science face when their grants are reviewed. And well, you can all identify or probably acknowledge the importance of these biases and why we shouldn't have them but there's actually one I would like to emphasize a bit more because maybe not all of you will think about it and they are familiar. Next slide. Disability. So some of us have done a little bit of research into what's out there for people with a disability and maybe you're not aware or maybe you will get a colleague who's not aware so that's why I wanted to highlight it today. Actually an organization called Chronically Academic that has a lot of research and also really advocating for people with a disability. Also several funding organizations actually offer or are looking into offering paid medical leave in case you have to go to the hospital or you cannot do your job for a couple of weeks or months. And there is a new one which is really in this COVID pandemic. We see all these funding opportunities arise and there's actually one from the Canadian National Educational Association of Disabled Students that's offering emergency support for students with disabilities in response to COVID-19. However, this is kind of all what we found so it's actually really not a lot and I don't know if you know but I don't know a lot of disabled scientists so it would be great if more attention will be paid to this group. Next slide please. And then alternative funding mechanisms. So some of us have looked at this and one that maybe you have all heard or are familiar with this is high-risk, high-gain funding which is really nice, it's small, lots of funding you don't need a lot of preliminary data and more and more funding organizations are offering such a scheme now. Then there have also been some trials with lottery-based funding in which in the first round people will look at if your project is suitable for funding and then in the second round there will be a lottery drawn so the chances of getting the funding is actually equal and you rule out this implicit bias in the second round. Then crowdfunding which is maybe not a big thing and very sustainable but actually I also know of some examples of people that have used crowdfunding to fund their research and then there is this last very recent so it's not in our pre-print initiative of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences that have now put a proposal together for the Dutch government to implement a rolling grant fund in which if you become an assistant professor you will get 250,000 euros and every step you go up the ladder you will get 125,000 euros more as a start which you can use for your research to hire a PhD student or to buy some equipment so you actually get that money to promote your own research and you don't have to put a lot of time and investment in writing a grant so I thought it was a really new out-of-the-box innovative idea and I'm very curious to see what will happen with this in the future. Next slide please. So this is my last slide and I thought I will tell you what I think you could do with the information we have put together and I think first of all of course is that you can share our pre-print because it's really something like this and I'm not saying that to tap myself on the shoulder but it's really a very extensive document of everything that's been done for researchers to promote or to have funding policies that are positive for ECRs to obtain funding and how other stakeholders and funding organisations can contribute to this and that brings me to my second point that I think it's really important to start or join a discussion about this topic and to make people aware that this is really important and how researches can benefit from those kind of improvements and then if you're interested in which funding organisations are actually working towards fair funding opportunities I would encourage you to look at the website of the San Francisco Dora Declaration and also at ECR Central which was another initiative from the E-Life community ambassadors we've also now indicated which funding organisations have actually signed to Dora so with that, I'm sorry I ran out of time I would like to give the floor back to Caroline thank you very much for your attention Thank you very much Loti for such a nice presentation and all that important information Next is Hugo Carignano who performed an independent study on initiation grants in Argentina and is also a contributor to E-Life ambassadors fair funding initiative Hugo will discuss how initiation grants benefit ECRs in Argentina and how this may set an example to encourage funding agencies and grant reviewers to open up funding opportunities to a more diverse set of researchers worldwide Thank you Thank you Caroline for the introduction Early career researchers are a skilled energetic enthusiastic workforce if well funded and committed to rational needs young researchers could be key players and a driving force of Latin American transformation the prosperity of countries can be visualised as a bigger cycle where intensive research in fundamental science coupled to the translation of novel ideas into innovative products encourage economic and social development at large from the profit obtained by decrease in the gross domestic product it will be possible to invest a substantial fraction of GDP in new research and therefore perpetuate the cycle However, which is the current situation in technology intensity and investment in science in Latin countries? Next slide please Currently, Latin American economy is currently based on the exploitation and export of raw materials and natural resources with little or no adoption of technology therefore, their economy growth is tied to the fluctuating price of commodities This situation results in high rise of poverty and social inequity in most of the Latin American countries For example, the value of manufactured sport as a percentage of merchandise stores are low Bolivia has the lowest value with only 5% The average value is around 50% for the region In contrast, the average value of manufactured sport for the selected group of high income countries is close to 76% Furthermore, in average, only 8% of the manufactured sport in Latin adopt cutting edge technology whereas in high income countries their average value is 17% Considering the objective of sustainable development the countries of the region have a huge potential to invest in research on priority areas such as renewable energies biotechnology applied to agribusiness information and communication technologies and preservation of biodiversity Next slide please The fraction of gross product expenditure on research as a percentage of GDP has remained low during the last five years by around 0.5 or less for all Latin American countries except Brazil, in which is around 1% The Latin American fraction of GDP invests on research is almost 2.0 below of that this time by high income countries Another particularity of Latin countries is the largest proportion of funds invested on research and development comes from the public sector, government and university with a scarce share of 20% from the private sector This situation is opposed to that found in high income countries where the share of the private sector represents around 70% In addition, the public sector not only financed the research but also carried the word out On the other hand, in high income countries research activities are mostly carried out by the private sector The demonstration that research expenditure is an investment and not an expense will be an essential step to engage the participation of the private sector in Latin countries Next slide please It is generally accepted that ECR constitutes the basis for the development of a competitive and sustainable national research system Since no scientific system can be consolidated without the setting of the challenge of today In this sense, adequate funding at this early stage is central to stimulate the assertion of these researchers Thus promoted the transfer of the knowledge acquired to meet the country needs I show Argentina as an example but the situation is in general equivalent in the rest of Latin In Argentina, the per year amount of an initiation grant is 15 times lower than in the US and almost 10 times less than in Chile and Spain The difference between Argentina and the US is up to 400 times lower if we compare grants for training researchers and from 2 to 7 times with respect to Chile, Spain and Brazil Currently, there are more than 7000 Argentine researchers abroad but in this scenario the incentive to return is very low The low rate of investment in science is not the only factor that threaten and delay easier scientific progress in Argentina For example, the time elapsed from the grant application until the funds are obtained is around a year and a half precluding a correct performance at the early stage of the career A commonly unwitting factor is related to the excessive cost that researchers have to pay for supplies and reactions that are regularly used in the lab In Argentina, the individual cost of this product doubles the value for which they can be obtained in the US The same products in Argentina are about 30% more expensive compared to other countries in the same region No less worrisome is the sexy delay of the reaction to the lab Another high cost is that related to the publication of research results Currently, the cost of the publication ranges from $500,000 to $10,000 meaning that up to 100% of the annual research funds received by a researcher can be destined to this solid item Paradoxically, Argentina is not among the countries that can regularly apply to a digital discount and waivers As a whole, this scenario is created where the low financing and high cost restrict the normal functioning on the scientific system At this crossroads, public policies often encourage researchers to resort to external sources of funding However, the agendas of international organizations are not necessarily aligned with the domestic needs Therefore, in order to initiate and sustain an economic virtual cycle in Argentina and other Latin countries it will be necessary that police makers adopt measures aimed to improve easier funding In this sense, public funding agencies should prioritize those lines of research that best suits the domestic needs and territorial resources Considering the current economic context the development of policies to favor the engagement of the private sector will increase the proportion of GDP designed to research without representing an admin in the government spending On the other hand, the creation of policies designed to achieve a reduction in taxes and importation times will be generated more equitable conditions in terms of the commercialization and availability of supplies and reaction Finally, equal and fair mechanisms of scientific results dissemination should be generated by promoting Thank you for your attention Thank you Iuguga for such a nice presentation We are going to go to our final panelist today She's Katie Grogan who leads the Job Application Reviewers Initiative on Future PI Slack Katie will share how ECAs can empower each other through peer support Katie, please Thank you, Carolina Next slide, please Actually, you can just keep going So today I'm going to talk about an initiative that I started a couple of years ago which is centered within a group called Future PI Slack Future PI Slack is a crowd sourced peer support and informal mentoring group It started for postdocs, but it also includes now a lot of senior graduate students adjuncts, visiting assistant professors Basically anyone who would like to obtain a job as an independent primary investigator and who has not yet obtained that job and who's also some within a couple of years of attempting to make that happen This group uses the Slack messaging service It's open to basically everybody We don't really have any restriction criteria And you can see on the picture here there's just some examples of channels of different topics that people talk about So things like what conferences, advertisements for conferences Does anyone want to collaborate? Tips for grants Talking about tips for acquiring things for lab startup non-academic careers, etc Next slide And within this Future PI Slack group I started organizing the Future PI Reviewing Groups It's a weekly peer review service for job application materials So this doesn't directly apply to the discussion about early career funding but I'm going to come back to how this initiative can be applied to this at the very end of this So first I'm going to go over what we do and then talk about how this can be applied when it comes to applying for funding And it's basically open to all Future PI Slack members So you have to be a member of Future PI Slack to participate It operates annually from August to December We might be operating into January this year just because it seems like a lot of advertisements are being posted a lot later And basically it's a service that reviews anything you might use to apply any kind of job application materials So people have had their CVs their cover letters, their statements of research statements of teaching, statements of diversity and really anything else that you can think of that you might need to include in a job application So why do we offer this service? Why did I start this service? The reason that I started it is that one of the things I found a lot of you was talking about how postdocs are often in short-term contracts that are frequently moving around which means that postdocs are often pretty isolated Most labs don't have more than a couple of postdocs Those postdocs are generally on different timelines So one might be in their first year of a postdoc the other might be in their fourth year of a postdoc and so they're going to be going on the job market at different times which means that it's hard to have a group of people even within a university but particularly within a lab or even a department that are all going on the job market at the same time and all need their job market application or their materials to be looked at on the same kind of timeline Often for postdocs institutional support is extremely varied If you've been a postdoc you're aware that you don't really count as a graduate student you don't really count as an employee and you don't really count as a faculty and so you often tend to slip through the cracks and even if there is institutional support in the form of say an office of postdoctoral education or something like that what they usually offer are workshops on how to set up your application materials but they don't often offer a mechanism to actually get feedback on your specific application materials it'll be a two hour workshop on here's how you can set up your research statement but there's no opportunity necessarily to have anyone take a look at your specific research statement and give you high level or even just simple grammatical feedback and so I had been in a previous postdoc position where I was a member of a cohort I was a member of ten postdocs I got hired at the same time and in the program there were 30 or 40 people and what that meant was that I had a group of people who were all on the same sort of timeline that I was that I could ask for feedback on documents of any kind and that I could help them I could also reciprocate right I could give them feedback and so when I moved to my second postdoc it was in a much smaller position and it occurred to me that I would be going on the job market just the one or two people in my lab or the four or five people in my department to be looking at this at my job application materials in particular because the people in my lab are very familiar with the types of work that I do whereas a committee of any kind either a job, a hiring committee or a grant review panel are going to have really disparate expertises and when you're writing anything whether it be a grant or a job application then you need to be able to explain your research to a wide array of people a group of people with a wide array of expertise and so having just people in your lab look at your materials doesn't always catch the sort of figure picture things that are not included that someone who doesn't study exactly what you do might not be familiar with next slide please so this service basically operates on a weekly basis you sign up sometime before Sunday because Sunday we send out an email asking people to actually confirm that they're going to participate we assign the groups on Monday basically based on who agreed to participate you then share your materials with your small group which is usually between two and four people on Monday or Tuesday whenever you get around to it some people in your group will share their materials with you you get a week to review the materials and then you are supposed to send your comments on their materials back on Friday then you take your time to edit your materials and then you sign up again if you feel like you want your documents to be re-reviewed and the whole goal of doing it on a Monday to Friday timeline is that if you wanted say you were on a tight timeline with a deadline coming up and you wanted to participate in multiple rounds of review you could spend the weekend editing your stuff and sign up again for the next week so you could have multiple rounds of turnaround with different people and the groups I will say we try to assign group of people with very similar areas of expertise so neuroscience might all be put together microbiome might all be put together but we try not to make them so specialized that we miss the sort of broader review purpose of this as well and we also do two to three people so that you aren't overwhelmed but get a fairly broad representation of what's happening next slide please I started this program in the fall of 2018 and since then it has grown pretty exponentially we started with just 20 people over the course of a couple of months this year so far we've had almost 80 sign up total the number of unique participants has been nearly 150 people who've done this on average the number of people that sign up is in any given week started at around 5 and now is up to nearly 10 with a max and a min of anywhere between 3 up to almost 20 people in one single week and the thing that I feel most excited about is that the average number of times that a person participates has increased from two times to three with some serious variation there where this year we had a couple of people who participated as many as eight or nine times next slide please so a couple of the pros we've talked to some of the participants and some of the things they've talked about where this actually gives you a really early deadline you have to get your materials together before your application is due and that helps people with their planning etc it's also really helpful to see how they structure their research statement etc obviously you get feedback both about the general structure of your application but also for really specific applications like I said if you have something that's coming up that you're really excited to apply for this can be a good gut check on whether this job application is a good fit for this type of thing we try to organize the group so that the broadness of the peer review expertise is representative of the broadness of the faculty hiring committee and I've also had anecdotal reports of people connecting with their peers so with their reviewing groups to then follow up later as they go through the job application process to talk to each other about how well your week is going how many applications have you put in and basically be really supportive of each other and I've heard that's been really helpful there's a couple of potential cons for participating in something like this obviously like with any kind of peer review I guess there's a potential for being scooped but because our expertise are so often so disparate that's a very rare I haven't heard of that happening and I don't expect it being a problem and then if you're a particularly competitive person I guess you're unfortunately increasing the quality of your competition but I think it also increases your quality of your own materials so it's worth it next slide please and one of the things that I think what I asked me to talk about this was that this has worked really well for job application materials but I could see this working as an extremely effective program for reviewing grants anecdotally I've had some people tell me that they actually started their own reviewing groups for things like applying for NIH R21s or for NIH postdoc fellowships things like that and I think that that could be a really good model for that kind of thing. It's actually been done before here in the US we have and I forget what this stands for but the NRMN which is basically the National Mentoring Network actually has a proposal preparation program that is about four months long that involves multiple rounds of peer review within this people who've signed up for this program and so there are instances of this happening in other places and then there's a paper by Coolidge et al where a university implemented this from actually manuscript peer reviewing to look at sort of the broadness of the potential reviewers next slide please and so if you wanted to join and you were interested in doing this we'll be doing this for at least a few more weeks you can either go to this website and click the join button and send an email to the person who organizes it or you can just send me an email and request an invitation and if you want to join the reviewing groups program the channel is job app reviewers and the sign up sheet the Google sign up sheet is pinned to the top of that channel and I think I'm done there next slide thank you Katie that was very interesting thank you to our speakers we now invite you all to ask questions to the panelists you can type a question in the question box here in the chat or tweet us questions on Twitter to add a live community using the hashtag ECR Wednesdays we do have a couple of questions now there is one question for Ugo it says what criteria do journals use to decide what individuals or countries can apply for editorial discounts and or waivers okay I am not sure because different journals have different lists so what is the criteria I don't know I think it is maybe we have arranged our foreign debt in the past so maybe that qualifies the country externally and the journal sees our country as a high income country but that is not true I think I don't know why but different journals have different lists of countries so I don't know yeah it's different to make it general maybe yeah and there is another question for you it says the agreements of Latin American countries invest more in R&D than business enterprises compared to high income countries do you know why I think it will be because we don't have a potential capital system established in our country maybe our enterprise don't have a high risk in their investment I suppose because science is a high risk investment maybe they go to the secure investment yeah it's true and I actually have a question related to that because what do you think is a more important strategy for a developing country that is more important for the government to try to invest more of the GDP directly on R&D or invest more in motivating the private sector to increase the investment on R&D what do you think could work better definitely I think we need more private sector to get engaged with research and development right now we have an economic crisis due to but now for the pandemic situation but we can't charge more to the government with the necessity to spend money in research we need to the private sector yeah particularly in these times there is a question for Katie and just application systems can be very different per country continent is it suitable for applicants at non-US institutions to join your initiative so we've actually had a lot of people who are applying for non-US institutions participate in the initiative and the only thing we ask is that you provide guidelines to your reviewers as to what the differences are and we do occasionally try to group people based on what the different types of institutions they're applying for but we sort of have prioritized grouping people based on expertise so that you don't have someone who is so far afield that they really aren't able to help with the science it's a little easier I find that we are all as academics so used to looking at different rules and regulations like Hugo was talking about with every journal has its own set of criteria every application has its own set of criteria every grant application looks different that it's easier to share how the applications to non-US institutions differ from US institutions than it is to try to share wildly disparate expertise so yeah we've had a lot of people who are applying for non-US institutions to participate okay thank you there is another question for you it says if people want to start a similar initiative within their own community do you have guidelines or the materials available I am so glad you asked this question because we are in the middle of writing a paper about this actually describe how this initiative works and to talk about the types of participants we've had the number of participants and also to actually do some surveys of the people who participated to get their feelings on whether it worked well what could be improved etc and we are hoping to have a paper put together by next summer or so that should describe exactly how this works so that people can start their own initiatives if someone is interested in starting this beforehand you are welcome to get in touch with me and I'm happy to provide more of a set of written guidelines for what we've done or even just to sit down and chat and tell you what we've done and how it's working and why we do specific things the way that we do them yeah happy to share but yes look for a paper on this I'm a little behind you go and body on getting the paper together so look in about six months thank you looking forward for that paper too there is a last question for you it says they have been have there been instances within future PI slack job application review that has given rise to collaborative research project securing funding I don't know of any anecdotally off the top of my head however that is one of the questions that we are including in the survey that we should be sending out to the participants to ask them what were the pros what were the cons and so hopefully if that has happened someone will tell us yeah I don't mostly I only hear from the people who are not yet have not yet secured a position and so they are usually not in an easy place where they can start applying for funding but we have now had several cohorts of this and so hopefully the people who participated in 2018 it's possible that they then went on to write collaborative grants for people they reviewed with okay nice there is now a question for Lottie it says do you see differences between the importance of ECR funding for landing a job depending on the country do some countries I'm guessing the US for example give more importance to having funding yes well we don't know for all countries I mean we have another meta research analysis on that also because it's difficult to get all the information also on how much funding each country gives or has for early career researchers so that was actually also one of our recommendations as well like to be more transparent and to be more open about that as a country or as funding organization but to come back to your question we have found only one paper that has analyzed that and it was for US grants where they found that it was not a prerequisite to obtain a job to get a faculty position when yeah you don't need to have the funding but if you have had independent funding before for example for your post up it was an advantage a big advantage to get the faculty position and I think for my own feeling and experience it is an important thing and maybe even it doesn't need to be a very big fellowship but I'm actually always telling people like even if you can apply for a travel grant to go to a conference or to visit a lab even if it's just in the neighbor country it shows some independence from your supervisor and it shows that you are driven to get some money to pursue your goals within your academic career so I think it's also an important personal development to even if you have the opportunity to apply for some small fundings can I I'm going to break in here for Lottie yes I actually so I applied for a lot of the smaller grants as a graduate student and when I got a fellowship as a postdoc that was mentioned in the reviews it wasn't a lot of money but there was that comment was that I had shown I had shown my ability to get funding and that actually was one of the stronger points of candidacy so I'm Lottie on even the small stuff can really help like the reviewers made a specific point that having had previous funding I was a good candidate for new funding okay thank you very much and now invite our panelists to offer some close remarks I will start yeah I hope that all the attendees have enjoyed today but also that you've learned something in that we have inspired you to think more about this topic and to maybe pursue some of your goals and for my part where what I've presented I think it's really important that we as early career researchers together stand for what we want and that we will be the driving force to drive change because more senior academics or funding organizations may not be in the field and they are not the early career researchers so I think if we want change we should really actively pursue and start a discussion with people around you and with funding organizations if you have contacts there so that's something I would like you to take away from today thank you Lothi also there is a final question for you it says when researching the fairness of grants did you get feedback from funders or heard of plans to improve accessibility we have we have tried to contact funders but it's also difficult however there are luckily funding organizations not all of them but some of them are really working towards a better research culture I think the biggest example I know also because I did my postdoc in London is the Wellcome Trust and they are really working towards this but also more and more societies and funding organizations are really looking to change the system because they also see that we're stuck in this so we haven't gotten direct feedback if they will do something with us we're also actively approaching funders so hopefully that will help in this discussion and improving change hopefully is there anything else that you want to add we can hear you sorry I would like to encourage to Sean Investigator to get involved with scientific policies I think we need them to improve our system I think we need voices different voices and get involved with the police makers and make the discussion thank you thank you Katie yeah I would second point that we are all examples of early career researchers who saw a whole a lack of support in something that we felt was important or a hole in the research on the science of being science of being a scientist and I would encourage everybody who's attending that if there is a hole that you feel needs to be plugged or you are upset that there isn't this particular support mechanism for you that some things can be initiated by yourself with very little effort and can have huge returns when I started this reviewing program it was me and 20 minutes a week and now it's big enough that there's nearly 100 people so far I've got a team of organizers that are helping me we are writing a paper etc so you can we it's up to us to change the system if you see a thing that you want to do that helps yourself and others I say go for it I know it takes a little bit of time but it can often have huge dividends down the road and I think that it's with a lot of the technology that's available we as a group are innovating in some really amazing and astounding ways and that could be you too thank you Katie we have to be involved and yeah if you enjoyed today's webinar the ECR Wednesday webinar series we'll recommend some 2021 and we hope you will join us then but for now I would like to say thank you to our speakers and to everyone who tune in today and contribute to the discussion it was a great opportunity to hear these unique perspectives on a complex topic and we hope you feel empowered to join the discussion and thank you very much