A few months ago, I asked my partner, also a research scientist: “it’s the week-end! Are you planning to chill?” Her answer, I kid you not, was: “Yes, I’m going to read a thesis”.
It is an #AcademicChatter fact that for many academics, the line between personal and professional life can be blurred. Academia can offer flexible hours. Many of us have learned to work whenever we can, or even whenever we feel inspired. That’s good and bad. It can be hard to switch off. And this can turn off aspiring academics, those who value their private time and struggle to manage the underlying sense of pressure to work non-stop.
I don’t have a simple answer to these issues, but I do have a problem with a prevailing notion that academics can be harassed any day of the week. I call for this to stop.
This post is addressed to journals, funding agencies and other bodies who regularly deal with academics. Please stop sending emails on the week-end and stop setting up inconveniently timed deadlines.
These are three incidents that just happened over the last few days (including the weekend!) and triggered this post.
Do not email authors proofs of their papers on Sunday morning. OK I know you subcontract that type of work to somewhere in the Indian subcontinent, but given the rate of Article Page Charges (APCs) dollars we pay, we surely can expect the publisher to add a few lines of scripts to their protocols to avoid weekend emails. How difficult is that?
Do not send incessant reminders about the reviewer reports, especially on the weekend. Another journal, which should remained unnamed, is published by a prestigious scientific society whose elected members appear to get in serious trouble now and then. Once you have kindly volunteered your unpaid services to review their papers, brace yourself for the email carpet bombing. They’ll start pestering you with emails every few day. Seriously, do we need a reminder 6 days before the deadline? Note that the automatic email (brilliant invention) was sent on Sunday at 23:48. And are we so pressed in time? If you are so concerned about speeding up the publishing process, why don’t you instead lobby your authors to preprint their submissions.
Do not have inconvenient deadlines likes August 31st. A well-known European funding agency has set up the end of August as their deadline for both proposal submissions and referee reports. I mean half of Europe is on holidays in August! Scientists should be tweeting photos from the beach not staying glued for hours to their laptops so they can fund their labs over the next years. OK, I understand that the agency staff wants to have something to do when they return tanned and relaxed from their Mediterranean break, but we also want to go to the beach. Please.
I can hear the argument, switch off your email. Many of us cannot fully separate our personal life from professional life. Also, as managers we have to regularly check-in for emergencies and so on. An example of an emergency just happened this Sunday morning, when we had to urgently modify the travel itinerary of a student who was scheduled to fly on Monday and didn’t have a transit visa.
It doesn’t seem that difficult to stop emailing authors and reviewers from Friday afternoon to Monday morning and avoid inconvenient deadlines. We need science publishers, funding agencies, University administrators and everyone else to help us improve the work culture in academia. OK, I’m now turning into an old-geezer running a well-funded big lab, but I do want to make science careers attractive and fun for the younger generation. Getting silly work emails on the week-end is nobody’s idea of fun. Please stop.