eLife Community Ambassadors Program

I was one of 243 volunteers from around the world to participate in the 2019 eLife Community Ambassadors program. As an Ambassador, I worked on promoting open science via two key initiatives outlined below.

Readability Initiative

Theo Sanderson and I co-led this initiative with the aim of producing ‘Lucid Bio’ adaptations of some papers published in eLife.
‘Lucid’ adaptations would be written in simpler language than is used in publications today, and also have interactive plots to allow readers to examine data deeply.
We used the template from Distil publications as a starting point, and produced a ‘Lucid’ adaptation of this paper.

I gave a summary of the Readability Initative at an ECRWednesday webinar on Oct 2021:

Meta-Research Initiative

I was part of a large, international team led by Tracey Weissgerber who undertook a Meta-Research project to evaluate the reporting quality of images in publications in three fields within the life sciences, namely Physiology, Plant Biology, and Cell Biology. We examined whether images reported in these fields had clear scale information, labels, and were colourblind-friendly. We found that only ~10% papers, on average, met all our minimal standards of reporting. Recognizing that this was largely because of unclear guidelines, we outlined recommendations and presented examples of best image reporting practices. You can learn more about this work in this peer-reviewed publication.

To learn more about Meta-Research, and our project on image reporting in publications in particular, watch this ECRWednesday webinar that I hosted in Oct 2021:

eLife Early-Career Advisory Group (ECAG)

I was a member and co-chair of the eLife Early-Career Advisory Group from May 2021-Oct 2023. The ECAG is a diverse committee who engages with the editorial leadership at eLife to shape and support eLife’s mission, offering an early-career perspective on the impacts of editorial policies. The ECAG also administered the eLife Community Ambassadors Program, and spearheaded and participated in numerous initiatives across the eLife ecosystem, all with the goal of making academia kinder, more inclusive, and more globally interconnected.

A summary of the key achievements of the ECAG in 2021 can be found here, and key achievements in the year 2022 can be found here.