In an interview with eLife, Emmanuelle shares her views on the work of the ECAG and her advice for other early-career researchers looking to make a difference.
Launched in 2014, the Early-Career Advisory Group (ECAG) represents the needs and aspirations of researchers at early stages in their careers as they help drive eLife’s work to catalyse broad reform in journal publishing and research communication. Emmanuelle Vire, an Investigator Scientist at University College London, UK, is a founding member of the group, which includes early-career scientists from across the world. She has watched the ECAG evolve as its members discovered more efficient ways of communicating and working together to achieve their goals.
Ahead of the elections to join the ECAG in 2019, we spoke to Emmanuelle as a long-standing member of the group and driving force behind one of its larger initiatives: the eLife Community Ambassadors programme. She tells us more about this and other activities carried out by the ECAG to help champion a change in academia. These include creating eLife’s #ECRWednesday webinar series and helping to spread the word about eLife as widely as possible.
“We’ve challenged some of the current policies, so we’ve proposed that early-career researchers would join the panel of reviewers that are seeing papers in eLife and they would fully contribute to the reviewing process...We’ve also proposed travel grants and so many other things,” Emmanuelle explains. “All of that in five years, starting from zero”.
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