elephant in the lab
This blog is not about actual elephants. Sorry. It is about science.
We are passionate about science and made a blog about it. But we are not covering the latest findings in elementary particle physics or essays on Luhmann’s system theory. This blog is about elephants in science – those problems everyone sees but nobody talks about: The journal system, Risks in science communication, Open science practices, Chances for young or female researchers. You name it.
Looking at it this way, this blog is about elephants after all. Elephants in the lab. One by one we will spot these elephants and write about them and as we go along, you are invited to participate in this great science safari.
What’s a blog journal? Every post is citable and we offer a peer review. Each entry receives a separate DOI. Did you spot an elephant in the wild? Do you have questions or recommendations? Let us know.
Team
Benedikt Fecher
Initiator and elephant enthusiast
Benedikt is managing director of Wissenschaft im Dialog. Before he was heading the research project Open Science and the programme Knowledge & Society at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. The question that keeps him busy at night: What is the impact of research?
Christian Kobsda
Initiator and elephant enthusiast
Christian works as head of the Berlin office at the Max Planck Society and is an associate researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. He spends his sleepless nights thinking about: scientific policy advice, digital innovation and prospective travel destinations.
Martin Manhembué
Initiator and elephant enthusiast
Martin is an agricultural scientist by training. He holds a PhD in environmental modelling and works a data scientist, professor and consultant. He devotes himself to the people behind science as former spokesperson of the doctoral researchers in the Leibniz Association and co-founder of the biggest network of doctoral researchers in Germany. If he has not fallen asleep he thinks about the integrity of science.
Nataliia Sokolovska
Editor in chief
Nataliia is head of the programme Knowledge & Society at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). She has a background in international relations and worked for several years in journalism and PR. What keeps her up at night is the question of how knowledge and innovations can be transmitted on an international scale.
Teresa Völker
Editor
Teresa Völker is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research a jointed initiative of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Freie Universtität Berlin. What keeps her up at night is how scholars can engage with the public, empower citizens and strengthen democracy by communicating research findings and sharing knowledge.
Philip Nebe
Former editor and family member
Philip worked at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and holds a Master degree in Sociology from the Technical University Berlin. The question of how equal conditions for scientists can be achieved in order to enable good scientific practices keeps him busy from sleeping.
Sascha Schönig
Editor
Sascha is a Sociologist who’s currently writing his Master-Thesis on a support structure for scientists dealing with attacks. His research interrests are at the intersection between science, society and technology with a focus on (changing) power-structures induced by one or all of the above mentioned.
Elias Koch
Editor in chief
Elias Koch is a Doctoral Candidate at the Research Training Group DYNAMICS and a Research Associate at the Hertie School. He is mainly interested in party competition, legislative politics and quantitative methods. In his PhD, he examines the attitudinal and behavourial consequences of election polling among voters, politicians and parties.
Rebecca Khan
Editor
Rebecca Kahn is a Digital Humanities scholar, with a focus on linked data, ontologies and historical sources. Her PhD investigated the interplay of digitisation and identity in the British Museum, and she works on ways to model historical topics, such as time, space, people and places in digital knowledge representations. At night, she stays awake worrying about how make museums useful, accessible and usable on the Internet.
Bronwen Deacon
Editor
Bronwen Deacon is a researcher at the programme ‘Knowledge & Society’ at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG). She has a background in Communication Studies and focuses now on Organizational Studies and Higher Education Research. Her constant companions are questions of how universities and university teaching will develop in the future in the context of digitization.
Melissa Laufer
Editor
Melissa Laufer is a senior researcher in the research programme ‘Knowledge & Society’ at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. She is interested in exploring change processes at universities and how stakeholders respond and adapt to change. Questions about academic culture and the socialization of early-career academics keep her up at night.
Freia Kuper
Editor
Freia Kuper is a researcher and magazine editor based in Berlin. Using qualitative social science methods she researched educational technologies and conditions of transdisciplinary research. Her overall research interest concern knowledge institutions and digital infrastructures as spaces of knowledge production.Freia studied Molecular Medicine (B.Sc.) and Universität Ulm and Istanbul Üniversitesi and Science Studies (M.A.) at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She is the editor of “hinterlands magazine”, a magazine showcasing diverse narratives from Europe’s rural regions.
Support our work
A team of professional enthusiasts and volunteers.
This blog journal builds on the labour of many volunteers and enthusiasts. Founded in 2017 is has since been held up by many fantastic scholars, scientists and creatives to grow and prosper.
It is backed with infrastructural support by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin that was founded in 2011 to research the development of the internet from a societal perspective and better understand the digitalisation of all spheres of life.
You can help us be the fantastic project that we are by joining our team of enthusiasts or by donating a coffee or your 13th income to Elephant in the Lab.
Advisory Board
Kieran Booluck
Advisory Board member
Kieran Booluck is Research Impact Manager at the London School of Economics and Political Science, working on the university’s impact submission to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework 2021. Prior to that, he was the editor of the LSE Impact Blog, publishing research and commentary on topics related to research policy, scholarly communications, and the wider impact of academic research. He also worked in academic journals publishing for a number of years.
Anna Curson
Advisory Board member
Anna Curson works as Strategic Partnership Manager at F1000Research with a focus on research funding agencies and corporate clients. Her role involves working with research funding organizations to develop new opportunities and partnerships for open research publishing as well as providing strategic oversight of existing initiatives including enhancements and developments.
Florian Freitstetter
Advisory Board member
Florian Freistetter, born in 1977, studied astronomy at the University of Vienna. Between 2000 und 2010 he worked as astronomer at the Universities of Vienna, Jena and Heidelberg. Since 2010 he works as science communicator. He has written some books, published in a lot of journals, owns a blog and a podcast and is part of the science comedy group Science Busters.
Sam Illingworth
Advisory Board member
Sam Illingworth is a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University, where his research involves using poetry and games to enhance dialogue between scientists and non-scientists. You can find out more about Sam’s work by visiting his website.
Mikael Laakso
Advisory Board member
Mikael Laakso works as an Associate Professor at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki Finland. He has been researching the changing landscape towards openness in scholarly publishing by studying combinations of bibliometrics, web metrics, business models, science policy, and author behaviour for over 10 years. In addition to research he is also active in open access advocacy as part of national and international working groups.
Anne Schreiter
Advisory Board member
Anne Schreiter is Executive Director of the German Scholars Organization (GSO), a non-profit that advocates for researchers and scientists, offering programs and training for academics to build impactful careers – in academia and beyond. After her PhD in Organization Studies and Cultural Theory at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, she spent a year as postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.
Toby Smith
Advisory Board member
Toby Smith has served at AAU since January 2003 as Vice President for Policy and oversees AAU’s policy projects, initiatives and activities including the AAU Undergraduate STEM education and PhD education initiatives. He is responsible for matters relating to science and innovation policy and broader impacts of science. Toby has written and spoken widely on science policy and funding issues. He is the co-author a book on national science policy titled, Beyond Sputnik – U.S. Science Policy in the 21stCentury.
Larissa Wunderlich
Design consultant and elephant whisperer
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