As the summer draws to a close, we thought this would be a good time for an update on what we’ve been up to at Science Craft.

This summer, our Scientific Writing workshops have benefited from guest lectures by Andy Hufton (editor of Molecular Systems Biology) and Adam Wilkins (former editor-in-chief of Bioessays and currently editor at Genetics) each providing an editor’s behind-the-scenes perspective on scientific publishing. The student feedback from both workshops was extremely enthusiastic, so thanks to Andy and Adam for inspiring the workshop participants.

New Workshops

Right now, we are putting the final touches to fresh material for our newest workshops. The Data Analysis for Bench Biologists workshop material has been improved, taking student feedback into consideration. The Proposal Writing workshop will premier in October and we’re particularly excited about offering this workshop together with Babette Regierer who brings an enormous amount of expertise and enthusiasm to this topic.

Science Craft’s Goals

Last week, Science Craft featured as “Start-Up of the Week” here at the Betahaus co-working space in Berlin. In the accompanying interview, we set-out our goal to fill the “mentoring gap” for graduate students in the life sciences in Germany. So later in the week we were delighted to see that our thoughts had telepathically reached the careers office at Nature. In an article entitled “Workshops that Work”, Nature argues that transferable skills training is indispensable for young researchers and notes that “graduate students and postdocs, under pressure to publish and seek funding, have little time to learn non-research skills to boost their competitiveness”. This observation echoes our own experience and neatly encapsulates our motivation in wanting to support young researchers. It also reminds us that “the reputation of a lab is often linked to the career successes of the people who have been trained there”. That should be enough for our prospective students to convince even the most sceptical supervisor about the merits of transferable skills workshops!

Manuscript Editing

Finally, last week saw the on-line publication of the first manuscript to benefit from Science Craft’s new editing service. We’d like to congratulate Dr Vassily Lyubetsky on successfully publishing at the open access journal Biology Direct and to thank him for entrusting his paper to Science Craft.