Earlier this month, I was pleased to see a paper published in PLoS Biology written by a large group of international researchers in the early stages of their careers about how we can improve research culture and practice. While I was one of the participants/authors, the real credit for driving the project goes to Brianne Kent, Constance Holman and Tracey Weissgerber. It was a heroic effort to try to consolidate the views of such a diverse set of researchers, but the process made a very clear point – the status quo is not good enough and early career researchers (ECRs) need to help drive the changes that they want to see in the system. The paper, entitled “Recommendations for empowering early career researchers to improve research culture and practice,” aligns with this message as well by calling on senior researchers and institutions to enable ECRs to be a part of the change.

What is an ECR anyway?

When we first started the Black Hole, we used the word “trainee” quite frequently, but it quickly became apparent that terms like this were poorly received by cohorts of highly trained individuals who still fell into the categories such as postdoctoral fellow or research associate. While ECR still has some issues, it is broadly used in our paper to include “graduate and medical students, young clinical researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and recently appointed independent investigators early in their independent careers.” Practically speaking for this article about empowering change-makers, this term is quite useful as it implies that ECRs are in it for the long haul and have a strong interest in creating a research culture that they will still be a part of. It is critical to gather opinions at the ECR stage and to empower these change-makers with real decision-making input for a number of reasons (listed in the article): 1) they represent a far more diverse community than senior researchers 2) they are generally more optimistic and amenable to change; and 3) they are more recently embedded in many of the key issues.

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