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Hacking Bureaucracy

A EuroScientist Special Issue – November 2016

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http://www.euroscientist.com/hacking-bureaucracy



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Table of Content

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 2

Welcome to this Special Issue of EuroScientist on: Hacking Bureaucracy ................................................................... 2

Editorial ............................................................................................................................................................... 3

Time for serious hacking in scholarly publishing .......................................................................................................... 3

In her own words ................................................................................................................................................. 5

Emmanuelle Charpentier: the strings attached to CRISPR/Cas9 success ..................................................................... 5

Emmanuelle Charpentier: European research funding could do with less red tape .................................................. 10

Hacking Solutions............................................................................................................................................... 13

Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy ............................................................................ 13

Thomas Landrain interview: short-circuiting research ............................................................................................... 17

Gemma Milne interview: Fast-tracking research through cross-fertilisation ............................................................. 20

Challenging Bureaucracy .................................................................................................................................... 22

The controversial art of research management ......................................................................................................... 25

Hans Wigzell interview: let the researchers free from bureaucrats ........................................................................... 26





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Introduction

Welcome to this Special Issue of EuroScientist on:

Hacking Bureaucracy

Welcome to our special issue of EuroScientist on hacking solutions to bureaucracy!

Bureaucracy is spreading like the plague. It has now pervaded every aspect of scientists' lives; often to the point of choking the hardiest of investigators.

Yet, technology has evolved so much so that it now offers simple solutions to cut through the paperwork and make the scientific process more efficient, more collaborative and altogether smarter.

Now, the time is right to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by technology and raise to the challenge of removing the hindrances brought by bureaucracy.

Find out more by reading our special issue below. And don't forget to share it widely within your circles. Every time you help us share our articles we get closer to reaching out to our community and fulfil our mission to stimulate a healthy debate.

The EuroScientist Team





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Editorial

Time for serious hacking solutions in scholarly publishing By Sabine Louët

Changing incentives to researchers and scientific-centric technology solutions could be the new normal

Hacking solutions to science problems are springing up everywhere. They attempt to remove bureaucracy and streamline research. But how many of these initiatives are coming from the science publishing industry? There is currently no TripAdvisor to the best journal for submission, no Deliveroo for laboratory reagent delivery. How about a decentralised peer-review based on the blockchain "") certification principle? Today, the social media networks for scientists—the likes of ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley—have only started a timid foray into what the future of scholarly publishing could look like.

This topic was debated in front of a room packed with science publishing executives at the STM conference, on 18th October 2016, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Earlier that day, Brian Nosek, executive director at the Centre for Open Science, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, gave a caveat about any future changes. He primarily saw the need to change the way incentives for scientist work so that, ultimately, research itself changes rather than technology platforms imposing change.

Yet, the key to adapting is “down to the pace of experiment,” said Phill Jones, head of publisher outreach, at Digital Science, London, UK, which provides technology solutions to the industry. Jones advocates doing



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_%28database

http://www.stm-assoc.org/events/stm-frankfurt-conference-2016/

https://www.projectimplicit.net/nosek/

https://cos.io/

https://www.digital-science.com/people/phill-jones/



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lots and lots of experiments to find solutions to better serve the scientific community. Indeed, “rapid evolution based on observed improvement is better than disruption for the sake of disruption,” agreed John Connolly, chief product officer at Springer Nature, London, UK.

Adopting an attitude that embrace these experiments “is the biggest change that we [the scholarly publishing industry] need to embrace,” Jones concluded. To do so, “we need publishers to be a lot less cautious,” noted Richard Padley, Chairman Semantico, London, UK, providing technology solutions to science publishers. “It is a cultural thing, publishers need to empower their organisation to use technology from the top down.”

So are the lives of scientists about to be changed? Arguably, yes. Resistance from proponents of the status quo may still arise. It may depend on the pace at which science publisher turn into technology service industry. The truth is “users want to see tools that are much more user-centred and less centred around publishers,” argued Connolly. However, “if you ask a scientists what they wanted [in the past], they would have said high impact factors articles,” said Phil Jones. “They thought this is what they wanted because there was no alternative,” Jones added, whereas: “they wanted to have higher impact of their research and have greater reach.”

Clearly, “if you are optimistic about publishers, there is a job for publishers, to synthesise knowledge, to see the relevant content,” said Connolly. This means taking quite a lot of adjustment to those who pay for content. A download is not a marker of whether you have passed on that synthesised knowledge!

Sabine Louët, EuroScientist Editor.

Toma Silinaite is a freelance illustrator, printmaker working and living in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Feel free to say 'Hi!': [email protected]



https://www.linkedin.com/in/jplconnolly

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jplconnolly

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/richardpadley

http://tomasilinaite.portfoliobox.io/about

mailto:[email protected]



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In her own words

Emmanuelle Charpentier: the strings attached to CRISPR/Cas9 success By Sabine Louët and Luca Tancredi Barone

Charpentier's achievements stem from her ability to navigate the convolunted funding landscape

Emmanuelle Charpentier is one of the most famous living scientists. She is one of the co-discoverer of the ground-breaking gene editing technique CRISPR/Cas9, designed to precisely insert DNA sequences into a genome. She is currently head of regulation and infection biology at the Max-Planck-Institute in Berlin, Germany, and visiting professor at Umeå University in Sweden. Euroscientist Editor Sabine Louët met the French scientist in Manchester at ESOF2016. They discussed her research, its ethical implications and the hurdles young scientists face on the path to securing funding and establishing their career.

How it all started





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Charpentier explains her research in simple words: “We try to understand the mechanism used by bacteria to cause diseases [and] to adapt and survive in their human host." Together with her team they are mainly focussing on regulatory mechanisms acting on DNA, RNA and proteins. Their goal is to find new drug targets and, perhaps, new techniques for gene silencing and gene targeting. This resulted in the development of new methods like CRISPR/Cas9. "We are basic scientists, happy to understand the mechanisms of life,” she points out.

Charpentier together with Jennifer Doudna and their colleagues discovered CRISP/Cas9 by studying the adaptive immune system of a type of bacteria. These can very smartly recognise foreign DNA and cut it out via the mediation of special proteins. This discovery, and its potential consequences, turned Charpentier into the object of unstoppable media attention.

The media curiosity has been fuelled further by the ongoing legal battle on the patent related to the new methods, estimated to be worth million of dollars. It opposes the University of California, Berkley, USA--where Charpentier and Doudna worked when they published their first seminal paper in 2012--to the Broad Institute, Cambdridge, Massachusetts,USA, where the main contender Feng Zhang works.

Funding struggle

Before becoming one of the Director at the Max-Planck-Institute, Charpentier has to go through many difficult times in her research career, peppered by multiple attempts to secure enough funding to keep her research going. “When I was a PI in Austria,” she says, “I had to look all the time for funding. I started in a very humble way, collecting different funding from small organisations.”

Competition was fierce. She thinks competition is good, however. That way, “only the most competitive science is funded,” she says. But the percentage for success for grants is way too low now, she believes, both at ERC – a type of funding that did not exist at the beginning of her career – and for other funding entities. “It was not easy to not have even one euro of stability,” she says.

She confesses that she got to the point of having to write 10-12 grants per year to make sure her budget woud be garanteed. She also believes that the timeframe covered by a grant – typically, three years, is too short: “five years would be more confortable,” she points out. “You end up having a lot of ideas, but little time to carry them on because you have to make sure your research is funded.”

And she adds: “It cannot be a good setting when you write grants and you do not have time to do and follow the research and guide properly the scientists in your lab.”

Bureaucracy

Another difficulty in her career has been bureaucracy, she notes, “especially if you have to change country.” Not only on a personal level – for logistics, tax issues, etc – but also because “it takes some time to enter in



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

http://www.nature.com/news/titanic-clash-over-crispr-patents-turns-ugly-1.20631

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/dramatic-twists-could-upend-patent-battle-over-crispr-genome-editing-method

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/dramatic-twists-could-upend-patent-battle-over-crispr-genome-editing-method



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a new funding system and get integrated. People need to get to know you and trust you.” She estimates that this process normally takes two or three years.

“Systems are not always adapted to fast integration”, she concludes. However, she notes, as an exception, “Germany was very different, and they were very generous for me from the beginning, and I did not have to fight for money.” She also shares the difficulties she has encountered as an early career scientist in a separate Q&A interview.

Ethics

Charpentier’s research raised a number of ethical concerns. In the associated podcast, she explains that these issues mainly arose once other scientists acknowledged that the CRISPR/Cas9 technique worked well in different types of cells or organisms. “That's when it came the concern: where will we go with this?” she said.

One aspect of the ethical concerns is the safety issues. Indeed, she believes, applying the gene editing method to human pathogens requires a careful approach to avoid creating superbugs, that could become resistant to antibiotics and escape the lab. Such careful handling is key to ward off the potential threat of bioterrorism. “Within the walls of a lab, scientists know what they are doing and know what kind of regulatory paperwork they need to complete and fill out.” A very “logical” procedure, she thinks.

Another aspect of the ethics debate is the necessary discussion about other types of research that “we would not be doing spontaneously,” she says. For example, the manipulation of embryos and of human germ lines. Also gene drive, the technique designed to transmit a certain gene to virtually all of the offsprings, raises concerns, she explains. This approach could also be used in a way that is beneficial for humain health as it raises the possibility of making sterile mosquitoes; one of the recently suggested application of the CRIPS/Cas9 technique to prevent malaria.

The French scientist declares, however, that “for the manipulation of germ lines, the technique is not ready yet," and she adds: "even if it were the case, I would be restrictive with regard to this application. Gene drive has to be considered with caution,” she concludes. Regulations are enforced within labs, but “we have a need for regulations also outside the lab.”

Science and media

Her work has generated media interest, making them part of her daily life. This made her consider the role of the media in a particular light. They work “on buzz and on the drama,” she says. Last year research carried out in China generated a "storm" after it became known that scientists were working on genetic germ lines; even though the method was not working properly. Some scientists in the US reacted and asked for a moratorium. It led to a statement that is even more open than [those] in place in Europe, she says dismissively.



http://www.euroscientist.com/emmanuelle-charpentier-research-funding-qa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive

http://www.nature.com/news/us-science-academies-take-on-human-genome-editing-1.17581



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In her view, part of her job is “to convince journalists that the technique is good, useful and reliable” and that maybe “some dogmas in biology will be revised.” She is confident that the “media got it” and hopes that “the message is still that the technique is transformative and really helpful”. Perhaps, she concludes, this can lead the public--without having an understanding the details of genetics--to “ask themselves questions” about the outcome of such scientific research.

Interview Sabine Louët.

Text and podcast editing Luca Tancredi Barone.

Photo Credit: Bianca Fioretti, Hallbauer & Fioretti - copyright owned by Emmanuelle Charpentier (CC BY-SA 4.0)



https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emmanuelle_Charpentier.jpg#/media/File:Emmanuelle_Charpentier.jpg



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In her own words

Emmanuelle Charpentier: European research funding could do with less red tape By Sabine Louët and Luca Tancredi Barone

The CRISPR/Cas9 co-inventor shares her perspective on research funding, mobility and career

Like many other scientists in Europe, Emmanuelle Charpentier had to fight very hard to get the research funding that allowed her to co-develop the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing method. In the second instalment of a two-part series, Charpentier, now head of regulation and infection biology at the Max-Planck-Institut in Berlin, Germany, gives her opinion on the challenges in obtaining funding in the current system in Europe. She also shares her views on how mobility can be hampered by bureaucracy. Finally, she points to the limited coherence for scientists pursuing a research career in Europe.

Q. What challenges did you encounter when seeking research funding?

I started my career as a principal investigator in the University of Vienna, in Austria. I needed to find external funds to go ahead with my research. So, I really started in a very humble way, with little research funding from different organisations in Austria. And I was always writing different proposals. You get to the point when you need to apply more than twice or three times to the same funding organisation. But this is ultimately a chance to get your research, or part of your research, funded. The focus of my research has always been basic science. People can understand a long-term perspective just in terms of applications. A



http://www.euroscientist.com/emmanuelle-charpentier-podcast

http://www.euroscientist.com/emmanuelle-charpentier-podcast



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scientist reading my application may think that it may be a long way to reach this goal. But CRISPR/Cas 9 shows that it is possible to do it in a relatively short time.

Q. What would you change in the current funding mechanism in Europe?

When I started in Vienna, I could not benefit from the funding like ERC, or the equivalent that many countries have now put in place. So, back then I needed to compete with more established faculty members for grants. I think it's good that there is competition, no one would like to have all the proposals funded because it would not be a competitive system. However, surely the percentage is way too low. ERC, for example, is around 12%. I always had to anticipate and I was always writing grants whatever was happening in my lab. I got to the point of writing 10 to 12 grants per year to different types of organisations to make sure that my budget would be running continuously.

Q. Is the length of the grants duration adequate?

It is clear that three years is too short of a time. Five years would be more comfortable, of course.

Q. How to handle the level of bureaucracy your career requires mobility?

One always loses a lot of time starting in a new country. And not only in bureaucracy at the personal level, for example, finding an apartment, getting into the tax system. There is a lot of bureaucracy just to get started. There is always a lack of support from the institutions in this regard. And then surely it always takes some time before you enter the system. You need to integrate at the political level to a certain extent. When you start your career and nobody knows you in the local scientific community, it’s harder to obtain funding. It’s normal, you come from outside. People need to trust you, and this takes time, two years minimum.

Q. Did you experience this level of bureaucracy at your current post at the Max Planck Institute?

In Germany, it was totally different. The German system was very generous with me right away. And I did not have to fight for money. Indeed, I have some colleagues joining the Max Planck Society who come from the US. They are quite shocked with the German bureaucracy because they are not used to it. Maybe they are more protected by their institutions that provide a central system that allows them to focus on the science. At the senior level, you don't want to have a disruptive period. You want to be cautious not to waste your time. The systems are not always adapted for a fast integration. Germany, on the contrary, had tools to integrate me fast.

Q. Is bureaucracy paralysing scientists’ mobility in Europe?

It is true that you have a lot of regulations in Europe. In Austria and Sweden, I was functioning, until very late, without technicians and without secretaries. By contrast, when entering the German system, you are confronted to the ‘Betriebsrat’--a kind of works council--where you have a lot of regulations with regard to how you employ technicians, how you employ secretaries or how you employ postdocs. You have a lot of regulations that are quite, let's say, disruptive. At the beginning, I experienced this at Helmholtz, three years ago, I experienced this again at Max Planck. I found that there was something a little bit peculiar in the system if it was such that I cannot be supported by the system that I was coming from originally, that was





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Helmholtz. And that the transition to Max Plank could not occur smoothly while everyone knew what I was facing. Surely you have failures in the system.

Q. Does mobility need to be improved?

Mobility is working very well for PhD students and postdocs. But the mobility is not always adapted at the senior level because at the senior level you don't want to have a disruptive period. You want to be operational right away, you already loose time because you lose personel. And you lose also a lot of time starting with a new paperwork, new bureaucracy, and you have to apply for and new grants when you change countries and the systems are not always adapted for a fast integration. So Germany had tools to integrate me fast. At Helmholtz and at Max Planck; they were very efficient with this regard. And very efficient to allow me to do the funding right away to be able to spend it. But all the rest, which is as important as having the funding, was totally not functioning.

Q. Can the structure of scientists’ career be improved, for example via tenure tracks?

Clearly, you have tenure track and tenure track. For me tenure track can be defined as when you have an opening of a junior position, an assistant professor position, this is not only for five to seven years. This is an opening for the long term. In the development plan of the university, the position is supposed to be on a sustainable basis. Sometimes, there is an opening for a position but you don't always have a follow-up. But right now what is happening is that you have a lot of assistant professor starting their career and when they go to the market for the next position, you don't have the same number of associate professorships announced. So often it is full professorships. It's a little bit problematic.

Q. So what are the solutions?

The tenure track is nevertheless a system that allows the scientist to gain some other perspective. So they may not end up in the university where they are assistant professor. But with mobility, you clearly have more possibilities, in a way, with regards to the young scientists integrating jobs in biotech or the pharmaceutical industry, for example. However, I have a lot of colleagues, for example in Germany, who are wondering you know what would happen to them. Because when they see the calls for the next position, it is very limited. By opening you know positions short terms, we accumulate the number of scientists in these situations. There is no prospective. This was a little bit the case with me. When I went to Umeå, I accepted the position of associate professor on the basis of five plus four years. That was the EMBL model. But at some point, I just decided that I should just go ahead with my research. If one day it doesn’t work out, fine. This would not be the end of the world! Actually, I was quite confident in this ‘fog’; I was confident, nevertheless.

Interview by Sabine Louët, EuroScientist Editor.

Transcription Luca Tancredi Barone, science journalist.

Photo credit: Sabine Louët, photo taken at ESOF 2016.





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Hacking Solutions

Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy By Michele Catanzaro

Tweaking scientists' social mechanisms may significantly alter the scientific endeavour

Imagine a world without peer review committees, project proposals or activity reports. Imagine a world where research funds seamlessly flow where they are best employed, like nutrients in a food-web or materials in a river network. Many scientists would immediately signup to live in such a world.

The Netherlands is set to become the place where this academic paradise will be tested, in the next few years. In July 2016, the Dutch parliament approved a motion related to implementing alternative funding



http://live.iop-pp01.agh.sleek.net/2016/07/20/dutch-funding-trial-puts-wisdom-of-the-crowd-centre-stage/



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procedures to alleviate the research bureaucracy, which is increasingly burdening scientists. Here EuroScientist investigates whether the self-organisation power of the scientific community could help resolve one of researchers' worse burden.

Self-organisation

The Dutch national funding agency is planning to adopt a radically new system to allocate part of its funding, promoted by ecologist Marten Sheffer, who is professor of aquatic ecology and water quality management at Wageningen University and Research Centre. Under the proposed approach, funds would intially be evenly divided among all scientists in the country. Then, they would each have to allocate half of what they have received to the person who, in their opinion, is the most deserving scientist in their network. Then, the process would be iterated.

The promoters of the system believe that the “wisdom of the crowd” of the scientific community would assigning more funds to the most deserving scientists among them; with minimal amount of paperwork. The Dutch initiative is part of a broader effort to use a scientific approach to improve science.

In other words, it is part of a trend aiming to employ scientific evidence to tweak the social mechanisms of academia. Specifically, findings from what is known as complexity research are increasingly brought forward as a way of reducing bureaucracy, removing red tape, and maximising the time scientists spend in thinking.

Collaborative social endeavour

One element of the world of complexity that is missing from the way resources are currenty allocated relates to the community-based dynamic of research. "Funding agencies are run by well-intentioned people. But they apply a 20th century contractor model; you want to refurbish your kitchen and you choose the best proposal," says Johan Bollen, a computational social scientist of Indiana University, IN, USA, who originally conceived the idea promoted by Sheffer. Unfortunately, he adds: "basic science does not work like this.”

Instead, "science has transformed into a much more collaborative endeavour, rather than a competitive one," he notes, "The current system does not leverage the fact that science is a social network.”

In devising his solution, Bollen took inspiration from Google’s approach to networks. When a new website is created, it does not need to submit a proposal processed by a committee before the search engine can rank it. Google uses an algorithm ranking at higher level the websites with a more salient position in the way they are inter-related to other sites on the web. “Why don’t we use the network of science to calculate who are the most productive scientists and give them the funds? ” asks Bollen. He points out: "In our system, scientists themselves distribute money along the network."

An outdated system



http://www.sparcs-center.org/about-us/staff-contacts/marten-scheffer.html

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/14/4/14.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems

http://modsti.cns.iu.edu/report/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1067

https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1067



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So what has made science bureaucracy become so out-dated? “We are working with methods conceived for the world of the 60s and the 70s," says Bollen. He adds: "Scientists are estimated to spend as much as 30% of their time writing proposals.” Others are even more pessimistic. "After teaching and paperwork, science is happening in the evenings and weekends, like a hobby,” says Dirk Helbing, professor of computational social science at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, who has been an advocate for “re-inventing innovation."

However, there is much more at stake than scientists’ spare time. “There hasn't been any great innovations since Darwin's theory of evolution and Einstein's theory of relativity,” writes Helbing in his Future ICT blog. He adds: “Science is increasingly run like a business, measured by performance indicators." He also points out: While we perform better and better according to these indicators […] the problems our society is facing haven't been fixed."

New forms of assessement

Performing measurement for the sake of it does not make sense. "When measures become a target, they stop being measures," says Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer at knowledge management company Cognitive Edge, "Now, they don’t measure anymore: they enforce orthodoxy. Novelty is very difficult.”

Instead, “a real understanding of science requires science to be applied to it: we would need good computational models of bureaucratic processes like control, guiding, etc. But it’s still early days” says Bruce Edmonds, director at the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, who specialises in agent-based simulations of the scientific processes.

Beyond evaluation and funding, complexity science may help reducing science bureaucracy in other ways. For example, by tracking real interactions between scientists, beyond the formal barriers of departments and hierarchies. Albert Díaz Guilera, professor of statistical physics at the University of Barcelona, compared the formal organisation chart of his university with the map of interactions between scientists as tracked by the volume of their email exchanges. “The formal network is like a skeleton, but the informal one is like a circulatory system,” he explains. This information, he believes, can be used to reorganise academic structures, to adapt to the informal ones and also to detect missing links and bottlenecks in the communication with an institution.

Peer review: fix it or leave it?

Abandoning the current bureaucratic, top-down system to evaluate and fund research, based on labour-intensive peer-review, may not be too much of a loss. “Peer-review is an imperfect, fragile mechanism. Our simulations show that assigning funds at random would not distort too much the results of the traditional mechanism,” says Flaminio Squazzoni, an economist at the University of Brescia, Italy, and the coordinator of the PEERE-New Frontiers of Peer Review COST action.



http://futurict.blogspot.com.es/2016/08/why-our-innovation-system-is-failing_87.html

http://www.euroscientist.com/art-research-management

http://cognitive-edge.com/

http://bruce.edmonds.name/

http://bruce.edmonds.name/

http://www.diaz-guilera.net/Albert_Diaz-Guilera/research_list.php

http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.68.065103

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/2/3.html

http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/tdp/TD1306



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In reality, peer-review is never quite neutral. “If scientists behave perfectly, then peer review works," Squazzoni explains, "but if strategic motivations are taken into account, like saving time or competition, then the results are worse than random.” Squazzoni believes that automation, economic incentives, or the creation of professional reviewers may improve the situation.

Helbing calls for an even more radical change in the philosophy of funding. “Since great ideas cannot be identified beforehand, we should shift from funding proposals to refunding great ideas,” he proposes. Scientists would get a starting capital without the need for filing proposal and after some time the funds would be increased or decreased depending on their success, without the need for writing reports. Helbing admits, however, that identifying great ideas would be still an open problem.

In fact, even the promoters of applying complexity to reducing bureaucracy recognise that change is not straightforward. “Making the rules more open ended […] can create a more fluid system that can adapt as the environment shifts,” says Jessica Flack, head of the collective computation group at the Sante Fe Institute, New Mexico, USA. She concludes: “It also, of course, makes for a more cheatable system so the rules that are relaxed should be those rules that do not have critical consequences or costs if violated.” No system is perfect!

Michele Catanzaro

Photo credit: NetMapper via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0



https://www.flickr.com/photos/netmapper/6963247715/



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Hacking Solutions

Thomas Landrain interview: short-circuiting research By Sabine Louët, Charline Pierre and Lena Kim

La Paillasse: fast-tracking innovation with citizens and experts and without intermediaries

Thomas Landrain in the co-founder and president of La Paillasse, an open laboratory based in Paris, France. The main characteristic of his initiative is that it is completely open for anybody to get involved. “That makes it very interesting because the distance between the [people involved] are much shorter,” Landrain explains. The objective is to remove the intermediaries between any two actors to be “much faster, much more efficient at delivering scientific projects,” he adds.

La Paillasse was born from a frustration Landrain experienced six years ago when he was still studying synthetic biology. “As a young researcher it was very hard to work with people outside my own institution,



http://lapaillasse.org/manifesto/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaslandrain



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outside even the world of academia,” he says, "If I wanted to work on something that was slightly different of the theme of my [research] institute, it would have been difficult." This led him to imagine a different set-up for fast-prototyping of innovative solutions to scientific problems.

Humble beginings

He intially opened a laboratory with friends in a squatt, located in the outskirts of Paris. It was entirely open to anybody interested. “Very fast, we had this amazing community, thousands of people who had very various skills. (…) Biologists were a minority. A lots of engineers, for example, people [who] had skills in electronics, in mechanics, in informatics, a lot of designers, artists,philosphers, sociologists,” he says.

La Paillasse offers many potentials for hacking traditional scientific approaches. For example, biomaterials are a very interesting example of what can happen in such a open lab. This is "because you need skills in biology, in design and in engineering,” he explains, "and to gather that diversity of skills it’s pretty hard normally." Working with people from different disciplines led to the development of a different kind of ink grown by bacteria, as a more eco-friendly alternative to ink produced by the petrochemical industry. This resulted to the creation of a start-up calld PILI focused on the biofabrication of colours produced by microorganisms.

Open science

Since its begining in a Paris suburb, La Paillasse has now moved to a large office space at the centre of the capital provided by the Paris Mayor. Today, its approach has evolved and its business model is based on partnerships using open data and open source. “There is no exclusivity for the partners,” says Thomas Landrain.

This approach stimulates greater reproducibilty. Anyone from around the world can jump in at any moment in the process of a study, to share their results or suggest a different and better approach. “You don’t get access to the results and the data only at the end of the study but you can be part of it," Landrain says, "You can basically co-build everything.” In his view, there is a clear advantage: “You don’t have to wait until the very end of the publication to be able to [use the existing results].”

Scalability without intermediaries

Conscious of the need to expand the concept on a greater scale, La Paillasse has developed a collaborative work platform permitting decentralised approach to solving scientific problems on a larger scale. In Particular, La Paillasse works with industrial partners, like Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, on a participatory and open research programme dedicated to understanding cancer using a Big Data approach.

The partners plan to release the second edition of their platform, called Epidemium, in March 2017. “We will [soon] be working much more closely with academic research laboratories. We want them to understand



http://archives.lesclesdedemain.lemonde.fr/innovation/thomas-landrain-la-paillasse-democratiser-toutes-les-technologies-emergentes-_a-54-4114.html

https://www.axa.com/en/spotlight/story/thomas-landrain-the-soul-of-a-biohacker

http://www.pili.bio/

http://www.epidemium.cc/



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that they can use such a platform as a leader for their research,” Landrain explains before adding: “they can ask the questions they are asking in their own lab, except they can ask it in the open.”

The idea is to open research outside the labs and to avoid the intermediaries. Landrain concludes: "The way [we] do science could be profoundly changed because you would not necessarily need to be an academic researcher anymore to do research and you can’t imagine doing this without such a dematerialised and decentralised platform which is able to monitor in real-time how people are working with each other."

Video editing and cover text Charline Pierre and Lena Kim.

Interview by Sabine Louët, EuroScientist editor.

Photo credit: Remy Bourganel





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Hacking Solutions

Gemma Milne interview: Fast-tracking research through cross-fertilisation

By Sabine Louët, Charline Pierre and Lena Kim

Science:Disrupt: the glue to making scientific multi-disciplinary concepts stick

Science’s slow processes, its steep barriers to entry, and its poor external and internal communication is eroding trust people have in science. Science:Disrupt is an initiative, which aims to make science evolve faster by bringing together scientists from across disciplines and geographies. “We are all about hosting discussions and showcasing the innovators iconoclasts and entrepreneurs that are attending in creating change in science,” says Gemma Milne, who, in April 2016, co-founded Science:Disrupt.

Inspired by the fast tracking of ideas taking place in the start-up scene, Gemma and her co-founder, Lawrence Yolland, wanted the same level of energy and creative stimulation to pervade the scientific process. She started asking questions: “Why is science so inefficient compared to tech?” With her background as a writer with experience in the advertising industry, Milne spent a lot of time going to events, conferences and meeting “people that are all about innovating”.



http://sciencedisrupt.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gkmilne1

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrenceyolland



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Yolland is familiar with tech circles as a computational biology PhD student at University College London, UK. Milne and Yolland felt that the way that tech industry advanced was through collaborations. She points out: “People don’t openly talk about how to really change science on the same way as it happens with techs, we wanted to create that sort of movement.

Scaling up

Milne and her co-founder also used Slack, discussion on social media using Slack, a social platform that allows people to create channels of discussions. “Anyone can get involved in a slack group,” she explains. “We’ve got one on science disruption, we have a channel on events, we have a channel about personalised health, we have a channel for people who are looking for people,” she says. Essentially, she has created a place for this whole community attending Science:Distrupt events and take part to discussions on how to advance science stimulated by articles and podcasts posted on the site.

She notes jokingly, sometimes “it’s the weirdest collaborations that end up being the most fruitful.” In a nutshell: “what we are trying to do [is] to get these sort of random-ish people in a room, who would never normally meet,” she says, and encourage them to “talk about what [they]’re doing, talk about the stuff that’s been on stage, talk about [their] hopes and dreams, talk about the start-up that [they] are trying to launch.”

Video editing and cover text Charline Pierre and Lena Kim.

Interview by Sabine Louët, EuroScientist Editor.

Photo credit: George Gottlieb



https://slack.com/



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Challenging Bureaucracy

The controversial art of research management By Fiona Dunlevy

Should managers without a research background oversee academic institutions?

The French agricultural research organisation INRA went through a tumultuous summer. The surprise and largely unwelcome appointment of the politician Philippe Mauguin as INRA president sent shockwaves in the French scientific community. Researchers at INRA and across France took to the internet this summer using the hashtag @INRAalert to vent their displeasure. They complained about the parachuting of a politician with no research experience into the coveted top position at the institute. In this article, Fiona Dunlevy investigates for EuroScientist whether it is necessary to have a scientist to head up research organisations or could managers do an equally good, or even better job?

Rise of the research manager



http://www.inra.fr/en/Scientists-Students

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/french-scientists-oppose-nominee-head-agricultural-research-institute



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So what is a research manager? “There's no single definition,” says Jan Andersen, Senior Executive Officer, and research manager at the Technical University, Kongens Lyngby in Denmark. “In general, it's the person mitigating the internal rules of the organisation or the rules of the funder and the researcher.” Research managers operate as a support service to research teams, he explains, helping researchers both to pull in funding and to fulfill their administrative obligations to those funders.

In today’s value for money society, funders are increasingly asking that research spending is justified. This generates additional reporting requirements, according to John Donovan, chair of the EARMA European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA) and research manager at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland. “Principal investigators don't like administration so they appreciate us taking the pain out of it”, says Donovan, “The objective is to make research a nice smooth experience.”

Andersen agrees that researchers appreciate the help. “If we do a good job, they are happy to have us,” he says, “On a generic level, they think that all administration is a burden. But in reality when we help them write a successful application, they can see how we take the burden off researchers’ shoulders.”

Experience matters

Clearly research managers can be well appreciated by researchers. So why did the researchers at INRA react so strongly to the appointment of a manager as their president? A major problem is Mauguin’s lack of research experience, explains Patrick Lemaire, principal investigator in developmental biology at the CNRS, Montpellier, and spokesperson for the lobby group Sciences en Marche. “Mauguin has been in ministerial cabinets his whole life," says Lemaire, “He has no connection with the scientific community."

What scientists are worried about is that the vision [of INRA] comes from the president, according to Lemaire. And it cannot be just an administrative vision, it has to be a scientific vision,” he says. A related problem is that Mauguin does not hold a doctorate which means that he could be seen as “underqualified by many of his foreign peers,” says Lemaire.

Public accountability

However, managing a research organisation is not just about the science. It is also about being accountable for the science, according to Robert Dingwall, consultant sociologist and professor at Nottingham Trent University, UK, and author of the Sage Handbook of Research Management. “It is really about managing the politicians, the public, the taxpayers to keep supporting the work and communicating the value of the work,” says Dingwall.

Taxpayers are the ultimate funders of research. And scientists need to justify the value of their work, even if the impact is not immediate. “Scientists aren't used to making that case, whereas politicians absolutely are,” says Dingwall, explaining that it can be an advantage to have an organisation leader “who knows how to talk to other politicians, to talk to the public, who knows how to construct that kind of narrative. This is pretty crucial in a period of austerity. If you want to justify the science funding you got to be able to make a case.”



http://www.dtu.dk/english/service/phonebook/person?id=113187&tab=0

http://www.dit.ie/researchandenterprise/meettheteam/staffprofiles/drjohndonovan/

http://www.earma.org/

http://www.crbm.cnrs.fr/index.php/fr/patrick-lemaire

http://sciencesenmarche.org/fr/

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https://books.google.ie/books/about/The_SAGE_Handbook_of_Research_Management.html?id=b0AdCAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y



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The right person for the job

Andersen admits that good scientists do not necessarily make good leaders. But he also believes that having good academic CV does matter for the credibility of research organisation heads, “because you're communicating with your peers who have this academic background, and it is a part of the job to show academic excellence in such a position.”

EARMA's Donovan agrees, adding that a solution is to have two people running the show. “The figure heading of the research is obviously better done by a researcher who’s familiar with what’s going on and who has the peer credibility that opens doors,” says Donovan, “But the efficient running of the business is probably better done by someone who understands how a business runs efficiently. They’ll often not be the same person and they’ll often disagree on the boundary between the two zones.”

Dual function

This is exactly how INRA used to be organised, according to Lemaire, who explains that there used to be both a president and a general director. "At that time it happened a few times that the president would be a scientist and the general director would be from one of the elite engineering schools," Lemaire says, "but it was considered acceptable because the president of the organisation was a scientist." He also adds: "Now that the two functions have been fused to the same person, it makes it more complicated to have someone who is not a scientist fulfilling the two functions.”

Having non-scientists in the top job appear to the the exception, however. "Very seldom is a research organisation or university ‘headed’ by a person without a PhD degree," points out Lidia Borrell-Damian,director of research and innovation at the European University Association (EUA), in Brussels, Belgium, "If so, it is usually because the organisation is ‘double-headed’, meaning that there is a person in charge of academic or scientific affairs, normally a well-recognised researcher, and a ‘non-academic’ person – with or without a PhD degree - in charge of the organisation’s strategic development, management and finances.”

It seems that, with many controversies, context is everything. As research becomes increasingly competitive and funding is held more accountable, research managers and administrators are showing their mettle. As for whether the top jobs at research organisations can or should be handled by non-scientists, the jury is still out. In the meantime, all eyes will be on INRA and Mauguin…

Fiona Dunlevy

Photo Credit: Michael Heiss (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)



http://www.eua.be/

http://www.euroscientist.com/hans-wigzell-interview-let-researchers-free-from-bureaucrats

https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelheiss/3090102907



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Hans Wigzell interview: let the researchers free from bureaucrats

By Jens Degett

The conflict between science and bureaucracy has reached unprecedented levels

Hans Wigzell is former president of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, adviser to the Swedish government and the European Commission as well as chairman of the Nobel Assembly. He is also professor emeritus of immunology at the Karolinska Institute. For decades, he has been one of the most influential scientists in Europe. In this exclusive interview to EuroScientist, reporter Jen Degett asked him whether research and bureaucracy are compatible.

Wigzell believes that “there is a conflict between science and bureaucracy" even though "there is a need for good bureaucrats." He adds: "Although scientist often refer to bureaucracy as being 'bad' or unnecessary



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this is not true." He argues that universities could not function without bureaucrats. However, "the bad thing is when bureaucrats go into details and start micromanaging things following bureaucratic rules."

A good example of how things can go wrong, in his view, is the Bologna Process, which aims for greater harmonisation in higher education. He denounces the process as a clear case of conflict where bureaucrats are trying to harmonise the educational systems in Europe.

The process aims to ensure that everybody who leaves the university with a PhD degree has the same skills. "This is completely nonsense” declares Wigzell, "There is a need for people with very different educational training and skills. If you want good scientists, you must let them grow and let them free." He argues that too many regulations and mandatory courses are devastating for creative initiatives.

Too much framing of research goes against the nature of the scientific endeavour. “In my mind science is like a rain forest where you walk around, you hear funny noises and there are good fruits," Wigzell notes. However, "there must be some control on economy, ethics, etc. but ... we should be able to let the researchers free.”

A strong research leader can make a difference by maximising freedom for the researchers within the legal structure. Hans Wigzell gives an example of a Cambridge Vice-Chancellor who define their job as to protect researchers from chaos.

He recognises that "right now, it is much more tough for young scientists to get a university job than a few decades ago." He notes that there is much more competition and stress. "To get funding is very challenging and it may pressure weak personalities not to behave in a 100% honest way," he adds.

Part of the solution, in his opinion, is the "need to control the ethical environment when there is a lot of competition." However, the strongest control is not about creation of bureaucratic rules or finding manipulated articles. “The strongest control is to set up a creative collaborative environment in the lab with high ethical standards," Wigzell argues and he concludes: "The solution is leadership which can reduce the need for bureaucratic rules.”

Jens Degett

Photo credit: Hans Wigzell



http://www.euroscientist.com/controversial-art-research-management/

http://www.euroscientist.com/controversial-art-research-management/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process

http://www.euroscientist.com/macchiarini-scandal-overstepping-research-ethics-mark/



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Under the diktat of paperwork By Anthony King

Funding from Europe has attracted a reputation for its bundles of form filling. So have we gone over to the dark-side with a ruinous mania of needless paperwork? Or is more accountability necessary and fair? In years gone by, scientists thrived on core funding handed out by their institution awarded directly by the State, but nowadays most have to raise funds by engaging into competitive funding tenders.

Accountability has a cost

Greater accountability and professionalization in science are needed in the view of Ralf Dahm, director of scientific management at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Mainz, Germany. “It is needed for institutions to compete in an increasingly global environment, for funding bodies to be able to identify the best proposals and ensure the projects are well run,” he says.

Other scientists agree. “Much of this originates from the wish to see more accountability and more evidence to support statements about the need/usefulness of spending” and “attempting to ensure quality and



http://www.imb-mainz.de/about-imb/scientific-management/director-of-scientific-management/



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comparisons of quality globally,” comments Jeremy Frey, physical chemist at Southampton University, UK. It’s not that previous practice was slack, but more was assumed and overall activity in universities was smaller, he says.

Often bureaucracy is a way of avoiding taking responsibility, counters Susan Greenfield, brain physiologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and former director of the London-based Royal Institution. Rather than making a decision, thereby dicing with attracting blame or making a gain, there is a tendency for people to play pass-the-parcel with responsibility. “It’s the mantra that you mustn’t get blamed for something if it goes wrong,” says Greenfield.

But there may also be a silver lining in putting thoughts to paper, say proponents. “Paperwork can be very painful, but having to sit down and think about what you want to do, why and how is also great to focus your ideas and thereby increase the likelihood that your project will work out,” Dahm argues. Perhaps it depends on personality or one’s views on what politic best suits a global research enterprise.

Room for serendipity

Some believe that accountability does not necessarily require as much paperwork as currently required. “People feel they must show everyone including the taxpayer that money is well spent and that means you are definitely going to get results. And in science you are not definitely going to get results. Things can come through serendipity and it is only by making mistakes that you really push the boundaries,” says Greenfield.

What constitutes the appearance of a more efficient, systematic approach does not necessarily guarantee results. “With everything so systematically evaluated, you feel much more bureaucratic yourself and more like an operative in some kind of industrial enterprise, rather than someone who could spend the morning brainstorming or following some crazy idea that might or might not pay off,” she says. Looking back to brilliant scientific discoveries, they often came from small institutions or serendipity. It very rarely comes out in an industrial way, she adds.

Remedies

Scientists concur that less paperwork is warranted in certain circumstances. Dahm argues for a tiered system, where funding bodies trust scientists with smaller, short-term projects: “The larger and longer-term a project becomes, it becomes more important to explain what is proposed and why it is significant, to justify the budget and monitor progress.” Another suggestion is that science managers could take away some of the paperwork. But others would be loath to hand over grant writing to someone else. They do not mind doing it, but would ask for just less pages. And fewer repetitions and endless forms of what appear to be the same line of questioning. Electronic forms seem to have exacerbated this illness.

Some of the foundations and trusts supporting science point the way forward, through simpler and less onerous evaluation systems. Greenfield cites the Dunhill Medical Trust’s positive attitude to serendipity, or chance discovery, in science. Dahm is impressed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its courage



http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~jgf/Frey/Home.html

http://www.susangreenfield.com/about/

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when awarding initial funding of $100,000 in its Grand Challenges in Global Health programme. This is awarded within four month of submission of a two-page proposal, with no preliminary data required.

Greater stress placed on face-to-face interviews, which would allow scientists answer questions and explain their thoughts, could be another option, according to Greenfield. Nothing replaces human judgement. It would be quicker too, she argues. But would this introduce a personality bias? Almost everyone agrees that two-step systems involving an initial short proposal are a positive development.

Part of the remedy could also come from technology and new ways of measuring scientists’ worth. “It is the duplication of information in slightly different formats that causes most annoyance, but things like DOI’s and the ability for systems to draw down the information they need from this is a great improvement,” says Frey, adding: “A wider appreciation of use and re-use of research and teaching outputs via less conventional means, such as altimetrics, is starting to come.”

Balancing act

Overall the need for accountability and a rise in bureaucracy is a balancing act. Those with the money want it well spent but they want their scientists doing science too. Scientists differ in their views and are swayed by career position, lifetime experiences and of course personality.

Anthony King

Photo credit: Kasaa.



http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/ApplicationInstructions.aspx

http://euroscientist.com/2013/02/navigating-the-altmetrics-maze-2/

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