TEDx Macclesfield

25 Oct 2019

Reading time ~17 minutes

I am terrified of public speaking. Genuinely. Terrified. Or at least I was. Being an academic, this is something I had to confront on a regular basis, as the only real way that others will learn about your research is by presenting it at conferences or through seminars. I spent my PhD years gaining momentum and confidence with respect to presenting, only to have it shattered at the end by a really, really, bad experience. I have been trying to gradually rebuild my confidence and overcome my work-related anxiety ever since. Organising HER+Data MCR and being a member of the first cohort of Tech Future Female Leaders have both empowered and inspired me to achieve things that I never set out to achieve - including giving a TEDx talk.

I received an email mid-February from Lynne Jones, one of the organisers of TEDxMacclesfield. She said that at TEDxMacc, they were exploring areas that they are interested in and looking for people who are at the forefront of their field, and that they wanted to add a scientist with a connection to Macclesfield to the lineup. It just so happens that Jodrell Bank Observatory, astronomy, tech and data are all prominent employers and sectors in the town, and so I was asked if I would like to suggest an idea worth spreading for a 10-12 minute talk? A HER+Data MCR member had put my name forward.

I was quite shocked to receive the email!

We arranged to have a phone call to discuss ideas. I initially suggested a few names of other people who I thought would be much better TEDx speakers than myself, and also out of fear of giving one myself. But I did also pitch what I would talk about if selected: Open Science. In the end, this was a topic the organisers were keen to hear about.

A Skype call with the second TEDxMacc organiser, Jude D’Souza, was then arranged - and we discussed all the different facets of Open Science that we could explore: the lack of diversity, mental health, commercial publishing and paywalls, and an archaic incentive and rewards system to name a few. I also shared with Jude my personal experiences within the system, and what drove me to advocate for a new way of working. We settled on keeping the focus of the talk more genearlly on research culture, which would allow us to tie all of these themes together.

Jude then drafted an outline of the way the talk could potentially flow, and we spent the next month going back and forth on the content and language. This was quite a busy time of year for me, and I struggled to get a full draft of the script completed in time for our coaching sessions. The organisers had arranged a series of sessions for us with Andrew Chaplin, a public speaking coach who helped us develop our delivery. My script wasn’t prepared for the first session, which made me extremely nervous and the familiar public speaking anxiety took over. However, I was able to more fully flush out the ideas I had with Andrew, and find the most compelling parts of my story to tell.

During this time, we were meant to be memorising our scripts. Even though I’ve given dozens of talks in the past, this process was completely different to anything I had ever experienced (you can get a sense of what was expected from us on the TEDx website). To say I was stressed would be an understatement. This TEDx talk consumed my entire life for 2 months. It was all I thought about, and I didn’t feel like I could properly socialise until it was over (if I had a spare moment, I felt like it should be devoted to finalising the script or practicing the talk).

I kept telling myself that if I could pull it off, if I - someone who is terrified of public speaking - could give a TEDx talk, then I could do anything.

My method for learning the talk, was to initially record myself reading my script, and then listen to it whenever I had a moment (usually during my commute to work). As I listened, I would refine the script at points where I stumbled or where it didn’t sound natural. I would then re-record it in the evening with the changes, and repeat. Once I felt comfortable enough, I began recording myself using the script increasingly less. Just overcoming my anxiety to practice the talk was always a huge task in itself - how was I actually going to deliver it on the day?

The TEDxMacclesfield event was scheduled for 4 May 2019. We had a full day dress rehearsal scheduled for the day before, where we had our final sessions with Andrew in the morning, and a full run through of the event in the afternoon. I therefore took the day before the dress rehearsal off of work to make sure I had the entire thing memorised. I can’t even tell you how many times I went through it that day, but I had done it. Every. Single. Word. Committed to memory. I finally relaxed.

I had met two of the other speakers during our coaching sessions, but it wasn’t until the dress rehearsal that I met everyone (there were 7 speakers in total):

Prof Barbara Evans - Professor in Public Health Engineering at the University of Leeds
Alistair Hudson - Director of the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery
Shelley Metcalfe - co-Founder of the Digital Life Skills Company
Paul Robinshaw - runs Flour Water Salt, a bakery and cafe in Macclesfield
Esther Bird - a 13 year old eco-activist from Macclesfield
Dr Ailsa Holland - a poet, activist and Director of Moormaid Press

and myself. There were also two performers, Ben Gorb and Hugo Kensdale, and our host Victoria Scholes. Everyone was incredibly supportive during the dress rehearsal, cheering each other on and trying to calm any nerves. When I had practiced my talk to myself at home, it always felt a bit monotone and lacking emotion. However, when I delivered it on the stage for the first time during rehearsal, the emotions hit me like a ton of bricks. I get quite personal at one point, and I hadn’t anticipated the effect that sharing it on a stage in the spotlight to a room full of people would have on me. It was a very good thing we had a dress rehearsal! In both practice runs, I got through my entire script without forgetting any of my lines. So in spite of getting overwhelmed with emotion in the middle of it, I was hugely relieved that I was prepared enough to deliver the talk. I went home and surprisingly got a good night’s sleep.

The next day was the main event, and it was truly one of the most surreal experiences I have ever had. I’m not sure I can really put it into words. I again got quite emotional during my talk and actually struggled to remember the next line at one point. 🙈 I didn’t panic, but I did need a few more seconds to collect myself than the schedule really allowed. Luckily, there was someone at the side of the stage with all of our scripts in case such an instance arose, and she fed me the start of the next line and I was able to carry on after that without issue (this little moment got edited out of the video, in case you think things never go wrong during TEDx talks!).

I do think it’s important to remind myself how far I’ve come and to celebrate it. Not only did I feel special for being a part of the event at all, but me getting up on that stage and overcoming a fear that has plagued me for years was a huge, personal milestone. I also allowed myself to get vulnerable on an international stage and publicly acknowledge some past events that I carry with me every day and try to hide.

All photos by TEDx Macclesfield

Open Science on its own is not enough to remove all of the structural barriers within the system towards marginalised communities, but I do believe that if we share as much as we can, it will go a long ways towards improving research culture. Open Science Isn’t Always Open to All Scientists, and current efforts to make research more accessible and transparent can reinforce inequality within STEM professions.

A 13 min talk could never be long enough to cover all the things I wanted to say, so I did the best that I could for a general audience in that amount of time. Any and all feedback is very much appreciated, and I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. It’s a conversation I’m really passionate about having, even if I don’t always get the words right. I’m always open to learning and improving.

You can watch the playlist of all the talks here and you can hear me talk more about my TEDxMacclesfield experience in the following podcasts:

Research Culture is Broken; Open Science can Fix It

Dutch Professor Diederik Stapel was a highly successful social psychologist: renowned in his field for his studies on human attitudes and behaviours, and respected for his dozens of publications in prestigious scholarly journals, often presenting data that was almost “too good to be true” (1).

One of his famous experiments was conducted at the Utrecht train station during a cleaners’ strike. A row of six chairs was left empty in the littered environment except for the first chair, which was occupied by either a Dutch-African or Dutch-Caucasian. Travellers were invited to choose one of the remaining seats to fill in a survey about how much they felt certain traits applied to certain groups of people. The experiment was repeated in the clean station following the strike.

His results were published in the influential academic journal Science, and got plenty of attention as they indicated that a trash-filled environment brought out racist tendencies in individuals. However, the seating arrangements at Utrecht train station - as meticulously described in the article - do not exist.

Stapel was eventually identified as a fraud, going from famous professor to infamous con man overnight. His fabrication of data was discovered to be breathtaking in scope, going back years and impacting numerous doctoral theses and articles. As of this year, Stapel has had 58 of his publications retracted, including the study at Utrecht station.

What type of academic culture allows someone to get away with this for so long? Investigating committees highlighted two key factors: First, Stapel was generally trusted because of his reputation. Any suspicions were met with “Do you really believe that someone with his status faked data?”

The second factor, was that the academic system did not require sufficient transparency into the research methods, nor did it expect the data to be made accessible. The committees blamed his peers, editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals.

Perhaps a more important question is why did he do it? And his answer, was because of the pressure to publish to get ahead.

Scholarly publishing as we know it today was born in the scientific boom after the second world war (2). Entrepreneurs took publishing research results out of the hands of scientific societies, creating numerous scholarly journals that could act as profit-generating machines.

Unlike traditional commercial publishing, scholarly publishers generally do not pay for their content nor its review. Editors check for suitability and grammar, but send it to other expert researchers in the field who review the scientific work on a voluntary - and anonymous - basis; a practice known as “peer review”. It then gets locked up behind a paywall, and sold back to those who produced it in the first place through high subscription fees. If the researcher wants their article to be made Open Access in the journal upon publication, they must pay an additional fee, which can cost up to thousands of dollars.

So - the state funds the research, pays the salaries of those checking the research, and then buys back most of the final product… And at the expense of the public purse. As the big commercial scholarly publishers celebrate profit margins of up to 40%, millions of dollars designated for research go straight into shareholders’ pockets. Before the internet, journals were the only way to disseminate research results, so publishers were a necessary part of the ecosystem. But why do they still enjoy a monopoly?

Until the 1970s, results were simply submitted to the most appropriate journal. But then publishers started cementing their prestige by focusing on their ‘impact factor’ - a measure of how often their articles are referenced in other articles. Soon, journals had a ranking, and scientists who regularly got articles into these ‘high-impact’ journals were rewarded with jobs and funding. It became less about what you published, and more about where.

“Publish or perish” is now a well-known mantra in academia. Almost half of research-intensive universities consider journal impact factors when deciding whom to promote (3), and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard friends and colleagues - who do important and interesting science - express concern that they won’t get a job or fellowship because they don’t have an article published in Nature.

But is this a fair yardstick?

Journals with high impact factors actually have the highest retraction rates (4), likely because they emphasise new and exciting results, which can be spurious or encourage bad research practices, over tried and tested methods. Stapel’s fraud was an extreme case, but subtler problems such as selective reporting is on the rise in the quest to get published in these journals. Stapel claimed that journal editors preferred simplicity. He said, “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler.’ ”

For all these reasons, we are undergoing a reproducibility crisis in research (5). More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own. This is exacerbated by a culture that doesn’t empower researchers to share their data (6) as they fear that reanalysis may expose errors or lead to conclusions that contradict their own (7) – Another reason Stapel wasn’t discovered sooner.

Unhealthy competition arising from the publish or perish model can manifest in other ways too. A colleague of mine submitted an article which was assigned to a peer reviewer with a clear conflict of interest. The reviewer held it in limbo for over a year through repeated revision requests, presumably while continuing their own research in the same field. They eventually rejected the article anyways. It was later submitted to a different journal, promptly accepted for publication and has gone on to be a significant work in the field. It has been referenced over 60 times in four years. But by this time it was too late, my colleague had already left academia, partly due to their frustration with this system. I’ve seen many others abandon ship for similar reasons.

If you think this is bad, the need to publish regularly for advancement also punishes those who take time out to start families, those suffering from illness or injury, or those with caring responsibilities. The unhealthy research culture resulting from such an incentive system, contributes to the reduction in diversity as one moves up the scientific career ladder: In 2017, over half of first-degree undergraduate students in the UK were women, yet fewer than a quarter of professors were women (8). The statistics are significantly more discouraging for non-white academics.

After I finished my PhD, I was burnt out. I had been traumatised by events where people were destructive rather than constructive. It triggered a severe case of imposter syndrome and anxiety. So I took a step back. I spent time volunteering and doing public outreach at the local observatory, where I steadily rekindled my passion for astrophysics and reminded myself why I traveled down this road in the first place. I decided to become an even more active, vocal and collaborative member of the community to help shift the culture from within. And here I am.

Pegging careers so tightly to publications creates a pressure that is unsustainable. The results are damaging both science AND scientists. But there is a solution.

Open Science is “the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods” (9).

You might be thinking ‘Isn’t that how science normally works?’ It will be, when we stop judging researchers based on the quantity of their work, and instead on its quality.

Other TED talks have discussed how Open Science can make knowledge more accessible or lead to breakthroughs. But Open Science could also help shift a toxic research culture from creating unhealthy competition to being more collaborative and inclusive. If sharing becomes the default, statistical manipulation and fraud like Stapel’s becomes much tougher to get away with as everyone can see how a given result was obtained. Allowing access to research from all stages of the workflow also ensures results are transparent, easy to reproduce and build upon. It strengthens the integrity of the work and eliminates wasteful duplication of effort.

And when over 70% (10) of research articles are no longer locked behind a paywall, the doors are thrown open for anyone - including under-resourced communities and the public - to learn from and contribute to the body of knowledge. Journals cease to be the sole authorities on talent, giving more people a seat at the table. A greater diversity of voices can only be a good thing for future collaboration, especially with major societal challenges to tackle such as climate change.

The Open Science movement is gaining momentum. In 2012, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment was developed - a worldwide initiative that recognises the need to improve the ways in which scholarly research is evaluated (11). Articles reporting new data become one metric among many, with the focus on the merit of the work. Let’s implement it!

Funding agencies and journals have begun requiring that the data underpinning results are published alongside articles in order to combat the reproducibility crisis and maximise the reach of the work. In 2018, the European Commission and the European Research Council threw their support behind Plan S - an initiative which requires that, from 2020, articles that result from publicly-funded research must be publicly accessible (12).

I’d like to highlight that the physics community has been sharing its articles online in an Open Access repository called the arXiv for decades, and other disciplines are starting to follow suit. This doesn’t have to be end for journals, just a long overdue evolution. When Napster came along, it forced the music business to innovate. The arrival of Netflix did the same for the film industry. Publishers have an important role to play, but it’s time for them to adapt to the 21st century - and there are many that are.

Open Science can be the gateway to a more inclusive and supportive culture in research - including retaining members from marginalised communities, improving wellbeing within the research ecosystem, and regaining public trust in science. It is time to shift the collective mindset from exclusive to inclusive. Most researchers did not go into science to find themselves in a constant race against their peers; they wanted to work together for the betterment of all. Let’s get back to that. Let’s make science open.