your academic FYP 16th January, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the informed scholar

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Hey Scholar, here's what we have for you this week:

• Funded PhD opportunities and Postdoc positions 🇬🇧 🇳🇴 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇯🇵;

• A hot new 'Science Feed';

• A podcast which says science can never be objective;

• Learn about publishing your research with a free webinar;

And much more

OPPORTUNITIES

💼Funded PhDs, Postdocs and academic job openings

• Funded PhDs @ University of Liverpool, UK: click here

• Funded PhD Positions @ The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway: click here

• Postdocs @ George Washington University, United States: click here

• Postdoc Fellowships and Research Associate Positions @ University of Alberta, Canada: click here

• Postdoc and Research Positions @ The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan: click here

If the idea of making your PhD application is daunting, here's a detailed guide to help you through the entire process👇

NEWS

🤖Clone wars: The papermill strikes back

Papermills, companies that sell fraudulent ready made research articles to academics under pressure to publish, are not new. They are, however, becoming increasingly sophisticated. Websites of journals owned by some of the biggest publishers in the game were 'cloned' by this papermill to look like the real thing and even published a handful of articles (complete with DOIs) before getting shut down.   

👀“Wow, you're teaching at Oxford. But they don't really pay you, do they?”

Only 34% of core tutorial teaching at Oxford is being done by permanent, full time professors. So who is doing the rest? PhD students and early career researchers pick up the slack, often for less than minimum wage.

🌌The sky's the limit

Not to be dramatic, but academic Twitter has been on the decline ever since we had to start calling it X (academic X just doesn't have the same verbal flow as academic Twitter, you know?). In search of a new place to disagree agreeably with each other, many academics are turning to the aptly named Bluesky. The “Science” feed feels exactly like academic Twitter in its golden age and get's 400,000 views a day: check it out here. 

BRAIN FOOD

⚖️'Research is political'

The above in itself is not a controversial statement. Professor Smith has a grudge against Professor Johnson for the mean way Johnson criticized their work at a conference 20 years ago. You know what I mean. But research is also “political political”. This excellent podcast episode goes as far as to argue that thanks to the way societal politics shapes what we research, science can never be objective. If that statement makes you shake your head, give it a listen.  

🧭Find your field, or let the field find you?

Imagine you got good results in your PhD and landed a Postdoc with a world renowned expert. Life is good. Except, while you were grinding away at your research, the world moved on - no one wants to hire you because your expertise is out of date. How do you bounce back from this? 

“You don't have to find a new field yourself, you can use the job market to let the field find you” - as answered by the user Wrzlprmft on this forum. 

RESOURCES

🎧A dark academia playlist

Winter has settled in and there's only a few weeks left until you can put your scholarly work away for the holiday season. This study playlist will make you feel like an alchemist trying to figure out the magic of the world. 

📢How to do research and get published

Looking to publish your first paper in 2025? Register for this live webinar by SAGE, complete with an interactive Q&A session to get your questions answered. But if you're unable to make it to the webinar, check out this guide on choosing where to publish your research created by Sheffield Hallam University Library.

KEEPING IT REAL

🐍How to publish in a predatory journal?

Source: Figure taken from an actual journal article that was accepted by a scientific journal but never got published because the authors refused to pay the $150 article processing charges. 

*We know that ‘apples' don't capture the full spectrum of human expression, so let us know what you didn't like about it by replying to this email.

We'd love to hear from you either way, so hit reply to send your comments, questions or ramblings to us!