A Reflection on One Year of Youth STEM Matters
It’s hard to believe that Youth STEM Matters was launched a whole year ago today - it seems like yesterday that the journal was just an idea and I can still vividly remember all of the planning in the lead up to the launch on 17th March 2020. I honestly had no idea what to expect, as whilst I had been involved in scientific publishing before, setting up a brand new journal was both exciting and nerve-wracking. At the time, life was still relatively normal with the COVID-19 pandemic still in its early stages here in the UK, so we were fully anticipating being able to attend science fairs, schools and universities to spread the word, encourage submissions and get young people involved. However, everything suddenly went fully virtual and we had to replan and adapt to the ever changing situation. As a group of young people working towards creating a journal that would both provide an accessible platform for the world's youth and set an example of best practice within scientific publishing, it was far from the only challenge we've faced over the past year. But we’ve learned a lot from those challenges, and are better for them, so I’m extremely proud of how far Youth STEM Matters has come in our first year.
Getting the Team Together
We set out to bring together young people who shared our mission and wanted to embark on the challenge of leading a scientific journal. Our digital outreach has allowed us to reach young people globally, with our first round of applications seeing 31 applicants from around the world wanting to get involved. As the year went on, we redoubled our efforts to reach as many young people as we could. The hard work of the team paid off and a huge 147 young people applied in our second round - nearly five times the initial number! It’s been positively overwhelming to see so many young people wanting to get involved, with over 400 young people from across the globe applying to join the Volunteer Team in total this year! Despite the countless hours reviewing applications, I cannot wait to welcome more young people to the team later this year.
Needless to say, the 71 volunteers who were selected to join the team have been incredible to work with and it’s been absolutely amazing to see each of them grow and develop. It became clear during our progress meetings with the team that many of them have been busy applying the skills they have learnt at Youth STEM Matters to their wider education and daily lives. Whether that’s been gaining confidence to present in front of an audience, being able to write better or improving coursework marks using research techniques we’ve taught, it’s important and encouraging that what we are doing has a real life benefit to young people.
This past year, we've also had the opportunity to work with some amazing people who are young at heart - professionals in academia and scientific publishing. They've offered their time and expertise to help us in our mission and collectively form our International Advisory Group (IAG). Our Advisors share their experience and expertise as an ally, to further our work and increase our impact as a journal and working with them has also been a definite highlight of the year!
Working With Our Authors
The driving force behind our journal comes from our authors. They come to us with ideas and projects to publish and are at the heart of our mission as a journal. It is vital that young people have a voice within the scientific community and a platform to speak up on global issues. After all, our generation will inherit today’s challenges and therefore deserve a voice in shaping the landscape of the future. For example, Lela DeVine (age 16, from Hawaii, USA) wrote up her research looking at whether we can produce sustainable anticancer compounds from marine coral. And whilst there has been plenty of research looking into such compounds, the link to environmental sustainability has perhaps been overlooked. Her research article is a prime example of a holistic approach towards research and how scientific research is moving away from examining issues in a single lens, instead taking an approach that considers the bigger picture - something all of our articles pride themselves on. A key highlight of the year was Youth STEM 2030 joining CrossRef which means all of our research and review articles now receive DOI links. So authors, like Lela, now have their research stored within a global database of scientific papers, giving them an even louder voice in the scientific community!
Although we’re a scientific journal, it might surprise you that publishing articles is not the end goal that we measure our success by. We have always aimed, and will continue to aim, to give young people the chance to develop their technical skills and scientific writing, and to provide them with a platform to share their research and ideas with the world. Our team, through reviewing articles, will guide our authors by questioning everything, providing feedback and encouraging them to go outside their comfort zones. I’m proud of how this has allowed our authors to produce their best work, which ultimately allows each article to have the biggest impact, both for the SDGs and for our authors.
Improving Our Processes
Alongside the hard work of our authors, striving to achieve that impact has also meant we’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to improve our processes for reviewing articles. It’s not always been easy, and in some cases we’ve had many iterations, but that’s what happens when you’re working towards setting an example of best practice in scientific publishing!
Within the Research Team we’ve developed a thorough double-blind peer review system, to ensure authors get fair, justified and useful feedback on their work. It wasn’t something we got right the first time, so as we’ve learned more about scientific publishing, we’ve been constantly revamping and remodelling how articles are reviewed in an effort to improve the overall experience for our authors. Authors now receive an ‘Action Table’ as part of our editorial decisions, giving them clear and strategic steps to improve their paper. And our new review form means authors get even more detailed and pertinent comments from our Reviewers. Alongside this, we’ve spent countless hours developing the skills of our Volunteer Team, which in turn improves the feedback authors receive. Looking forward, we’re working to create more pre-submission guidance for our authors and we’ll also be spending time further developing the critical thinking skills of our team, so that overall we can make our review process as transparent and accessible as possible!
Our Science Communication Team has also come a long way from the early days. From recently having re-categorised the formats of our articles, to creating new roles within the team, it’s been a year of lots of trial and error to achieve the best for our authors and team members. It’s very much becoming a team that prioritises everyone working together to write impactful articles that raise awareness of global challenges, and I believe that both the articles themselves and the global collaborations we’ve created are key in shaping a better future for everyone.
We’ve worked really hard to develop our production process to ensure that the final article is something our authors are proud of. Our Copy-Editors have recently undergone an extensive training programme to develop their copy-editing skills and understand the nuances of scientific communication. Alongside our Scientific Copy-Editors, we’ve also appointed English Language Copy-Editors who do not necessarily have a scientific background, but an interest in STEM and eagerness to learn more. This is testament to our belief that successful scientific publishing takes an interdisciplinary approach and STEM needs everyone! We’ve also appointed Artists and Typesetters who play a key role in the accessibility of our articles, and make sure each article looks amazing.
Before we welcome the next group of volunteers later this year, our Leadership Team will be working alongside our Advisors on further developing research and communication skills across our team. If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that science is a continuous learning journey!
Personal Highlights
Over the past year since launching, I have formed so many great memories, from welcoming new members of the team to reading about some of the incredible things young people have done using STEM. A lot has happened in just a year, but there have definitely been some key moments that particularly stand out:
Presenting at the Youth STEM Summit and the Nuffield Research Placement Virtual Celebration Event. It was great fun working with members from the team to plan these presentations, and to talk to other young people across the globe about Youth STEM Matters. Despite the many hours spent practising and preparing, the feedback was really positive and it’s been a good way of getting more young people involved in the journal, both as authors and team members!
Speaking to professionals in industry and academia. From talking to Siri Crane (Head of Editorial Support at Nature) to Prof Rana Dajani (Professor of Molecular Cell Biology & Youth STEM Matters Advisor), it has been great to learn from the people we’ve spoken to - both in terms of how to become better scientists and just as citizens within our society. All these conversations started from an initial email being sent, and I still remember how shocked I was when Rana had replied to my request to interview her! It is incredible how a simple email can go a long way, and in fact these initial emails and conversations with people who we soon realised shared our passion for our mission have been key in setting up the IAG.
Creating a team community. It’s important to remember that all our team are volunteers, so we have needed to be proactive in creating a positive team atmosphere and environment. A specific memory that made me realise how critical the team culture would be was during the live training call for our first ever group of new team members (which I was incredibly nervous for!). A little debate over whether Marvel or Harry Potter is better started amongst us all. It was a bizarre conversation but was a turning point in the engagement between everyone and has often become a long-standing matter of debate! It’s great to be part of a team of young people all equally passionate about using science to make change in society, but also keen to work with individuals from across the globe and make long term connections with others. Poppy, one of our Life Sciences Editors, probably sums it up best: “the people on the team are friends I’ve never met”.
Whilst these are only some of the memories from the past year, I am extremely grateful to have worked with such amazing young people. We’ve come a long way since the initial plan, and the journal looks very different now from what we anticipated - but in a good way. Yes, there have been challenges that have come, and there have been some tough decisions along the way, but I wholeheartedly believe we have made an impact by giving young people the opportunity to gain new skills, the support to engage with scientific publishing, and the platform to have their say on tackling the world’s biggest challenges through STEM. There is still a lot of room to grow, and over the coming year we plan to systematically grow as a journal: both in terms of size and even more so in terms of impact.
