| Dear all, I want to chime in to say thank you to everyone who has spoken out pointing to the inequities and biases that dominate academia, from peer-review to criteria for promotion. I would like to acknowledge the brave voices of not just senior researchers, but also those of the trainees, especially Alexandria Lesicko, who inspired me with with her wisdom, grace and courage. I am so proud of our trainees who are committed to making this world a better place. I agree with KC that many of us are working to make the systems better, but what we’re doing is not enough to level the playing field. We continue disproportionally losing women, scientists of color and members of other underrepresented minorities throughout the training and faculty appointments, every year, every promotion step. We have to do more! From acknowledging and checking our own bias to fighting to bring about institutional change, and opening up the opportunities and giving a platform to voices that are heard too rarely, we have to actively work on helping and promoting scientists from diverse backgrounds. I know many of you are already working on this, but if you don’t, consider starting locally, in your own laboratory or institute. For example, in my lab, we have been making an effort to participate in training programs for undergraduate students from Penn and other institutions that recruit students from diverse backgrounds. We also run a series of presentations by our lab members on the work of scientists of color. And we read literature on anti-racism, had discussions on how to combat bias in science and participated in community outreach. As to the original topic of peer review, to me, posting to a preprint server at the same time as submitting the paper to a peer-reviewed journal is a no brainer. We have been doing this for about 6 years, and have only had positive experience with it. On the other hand, publishing in peer-reviewed journals has become considerably slower in recent years — for example, we’re in final bouts of revisions for a peer-reviewed journal for a paper that was originally posted to BioRXiv in 2021. From grant review panels to promotion reviews, pre-prints made it possible for those evaluating our work to see for themselves what experiments were performed and what work was done despite the delays in peer-review process. And reading pre-prints from other laboratories has in turn informed our experiments and interpretation. With kind wishes, -Maria ______________________________ Maria N. Geffen, Ph.D. (she/her) Professor Department of Otorhinolaryngology Department of Neuroscience Department of Neurology Co-Director, Computational Neuroscience Initiative Stemmler Hall G14 3450 Hamilton Walk Philadelphia PA 19104 (215)898-0782 mgeffen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx My zoom room Follow me @geffenlab@mastodon.world http://hosting.med.upenn.edu/hearing Twitter: @neimarkgeffen
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