What do we mean by excellence in science?

To publish in a journal like Science or Nature means that you’ve had to compete against a very large number of people to gain space in that journal. When I was a younger scientist, not getting my papers into those journals used to literally make me weep; yet, ultimately, the important thing has always been that an experiment isn’t really finished unless it’s published. As my lab expanded, I would keep my tears and frustration to myself and I would say to the younger members of my lab: ‘It doesn’t matter. Your career is not destroyed because you haven’t published in that journal. We need to publish it. We need to be proud that this is an excellent piece of work, and although it’s not been judged excellent by this criterion of where it’s published, we know that it’s right and we know that it can push the field forward.’

Publishing your work is important because if you just keep it to yourself, nobody will know what you’ve discovered and the field will not move forward. Of course, now, there are so many different ways to share the information that you’ve discovered that defining excellence by which journal you publish in is old-fashioned.

One of the things that has been remarkable over the last years with the COVID-19 pandemic has been the reliance on sharing data in the form of preprint servers. That’s where you say: ‘This is what we’ve discovered. We will subject it to review by peers anonymously, but for now, we would like you to see this information.’ There are a number of platforms where that has happened. The two that I’m associated with are bioRxiv and medRxiv.

Historically, there has been a resistance to preprint servers because people have said: ‘That’s cheating. You’ve just posted what you’ve discovered. We don’t know if it’s right or not because it hasn’t undergone this process of anonymous assessment.’ Accelerated by the need to share information really rapidly, it’s made people stand up and say: ‘This is what we’ve discovered. We may have to refine it based on other people’s comments, but do you know what? You don’t need to comment anonymously. You can comment on this work and give your name.’ So, it changes from being a sort of competitive process to being a more iterative process.

Two or three years ago, we submitted a piece of work to a preprint server which had very large data sets. We wanted to share them so that the community could use them while we went through the process of having our work published in the journal. I was really surprised to get an email from a student in California who said she chose our paper to discuss in her PhD class and gave the criticisms of the work that they had found. She then said that she had just noticed that I’d posted a revised version of our preprint, which addressed many of her comments, and she wished us good luck with publishing our paper. That was very interesting to me: by virtue of sharing the work, we had inadvertently contributed to the training of students. It was a lovely experience.

One of the things that is characteristic of too many scientists is anxiety about their careers. They’re anxious about whether they will get their PhD. They’re anxious about being on a fixed-term contract. In a university, they may be pleased that they’ve got an assistant professorship, but then they’re anxious about getting tenure. In fact, the anxiety goes on and on. You could be one of the top scientists in the world, but every year when Nobel Prize season comes around, you’ll be anxious about not getting that phone call. I personally don’t think that that level of anxiety is necessarily healthy. I think it’s destructive.

One of the things that I find frustrating with the young scientists in my lab is that when they’re upset about where their work is published, they’ll tell me that they will never get a job. I turn around and ask them who they know who’s been in the lab and failed to get a job. And they always tell me: ‘Well, that was last year. It’s very different this year.’ The best way for advice would be: if you can’t handle the anxiety, I don’t think science is a great career. Mainly, it doesn’t pay particularly well, and you should only be doing science for the passion, the fun, the excitement of it, not because of some end goal which ultimately may be unachievable.

Careers for scientists are no longer linear: it’s no longer from PhD to professor. There are so many job opportunities out there and we have many opportunities to experience different sectors. For example, you might be able to spend time as a government adviser. You might be able to work for a pharmaceutical company and use that as a springboard, possibly back into academia, maybe into other sectors. Regulation of healthcare products is another area that is hugely important. Sometimes, we just need to step back and think it’s not a race; or, if it is a race, it’s not a linear race. It’s best to define excellence on your own terms rather than fearing failure.