The Abstract: February 2021
Welcome to The Abstract - your monthly round up of all the latest news from Youth STEM Matters, our youth-led scientific journal.
This month, we’ve got some Volunteer Team members with new leadership roles to introduce, spent a lot of time reviewing applications and interviewing our latest group of applicants, recognised our Volunteer of the Month, and assigned our first ever DOI to an article!
Meet Our New Editors and Lead Typesetter
Following a competitive application process, we’re excited to introduce 4 new Editors within our Research Team and a new Lead Typesetter! Congratulations to new Life Sciences Editors Kavina Uthayakumaran and Lucy Chen, Physical Sciences Editors Aayush Shrestha and Lucy Mbochi, and Lead Typesetter Aditi Kona!
When asked about what she’s looking forward to about the new role, Physical Sciences Editor Lucy Mbochi said:
“Taking on this new role is exciting as I get to play a different role in the publication process. I have the opportunity to both learn from and guide a team of reviewers, and use their expertise to help make editorial decisions regarding the submitted papers.”
And on her hopes for the Research Team’s Life Sciences Reviewers, Life Sciences Editor Kavina Uthayakumaran said:
“I hope to see our team of reviewers go above and beyond to help authors improve their papers until it is the best that it can be. I want to see the team achieve this by critically thinking about the science of each paper and doing their best to provide constructive feedback to our authors.”
Behind the Scenes of Our January 2021 Application Round
Last month, we shared that we’d received 107 applications from youth in 29 countries globally, all wanting to join the Youth STEM Matters Volunteer Team. We spent a lot of February reviewing every application and interviewing a shortlist of applicants - in fact, our team collectively dedicated almost 150 hours to making those difficult decisions! A total of 12 members of our Volunteer Team got experience of reviewing applications, scoring tasks submitted by applicants, and interviewing, giving everyone involved some great experience of what it’s like to be on the other side of an interview.
After much deliberation of the excellent applicants we considered, we’re pleased to have invited 16 young people from 9 countries globally to join the Volunteer Team, and we’re looking forward to introducing them once they’ve completed their training later this month!
February 2021 Volunteer of the Month Recognised!
Congratulations to Meg Ardis who is the Volunteer of the Month for February 2021!
Having been nominated by another member of the Volunteer Team, Meg was recognised for demonstrating an outstanding work ethic, and taking on the additional responsibilities of a second role. She has made a particular effort to work closely with the Science Communication Team to develop their skills, providing in-depth feedback on their articles, and actively asking if they need help. Moreover, Meg’s bigger picture thinking and responsiveness to feedback has helped to systemically strengthen the Science Communication Team. This has included proactively remodelling the procedures of writing/editing articles to drive an improvement in overall quality of the articles we publish. Well done Meg!
“This is really cool! It’s been a busy month, but the whole SciComm team’s been working hard, so it’s been a rewarding month too. We’ve been really pushing everyone in terms of developing their writing and editing skills this month. The team have been rising to that challenge, and it doesn’t go unnoticed - I’m really grateful for their hard work!”
DOIs Give Our Authors a Louder Voice in the Scientific Community
We were excited to announce this month that Youth STEM 2030 has joined Crossref, meaning that all of our Original Research and Review Articles will now be assigned DOIs (digital object identifiers). Read our full story to find out how this will give our young authors a louder voice within the scientific community…
