It’s hard to be a newly graduated student who is trying to get into grad school. Some advisors don’t realize how hard it is to gain access to opportunity once you’ve left the institution. Postbacs can’t participate in summer research opportunities, are not regularly interacting with students, don’t have access to a university writing center, and probably even lost their library access. Just being on campus on a regular basis provides momentum and support towards grad school.

It’s so much worse because of the pandemic. The people who graduated last year, and those who are graduating right now, really need access to opportunity and support. What can we do?

This is where NSF-BIO has stepped up. They’ve launched a new program this week: REPS: Research Experiences for Post-Baccalaureate Students. Here’s the blog post about this on main BIO blog for NSF, and here’s a post with a bit more information on the BIO-DEB blog. And here’s the official Dear Colleague Letter for this opportunity, which is numbered NSF 21-085.

To make the long story short, if you have recently received your bachelor’s degree, then you have the chance to get funded to do research project that is very similar to an REU. You can even participate in an existing REU site!

It’s not rare for people to remark, “Why should journals expect me to work for free? Reviews are hard work and my time is valuable, and journals since people are paying to publish and journals have revenue streams, so I should get paid!” Or something like that. It doesn’t sound unreasonable.

I don’t think having academic journals pay for reviews as a general proposition is a good idea. Is it good for people to be compensated for their work? Yes. However, would it be worth the necessary consequences if it became standard practice for journals to use a fraction of their budgets to pay reviewers? I don’t think so. If you happen to be one of the “I don’t want to review unless I get paid” crowd, please hear me out.