Three Reports Tackle the Postdoc Mess

"The plight of early-career scientists has come under exceptional scrutiny in recent weeks as three major scientific institutions each released a report on the postdoc system. The National Research Council (NRC) led off in mid-March 2005 with Bridges to Independence: Fostering the Independence of New Investigators in Biomedical Research. Then in late April the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Sigma Xi weighed in, respectively, with Postdoctoral Appointments: Policies and Practices — Report on a Workshop and Doctors Without Orders: Highlights of the Sigma Xi Survey. The three studies do not agree on the best solutions or even on what the real problem is. They propose fixes ranging from incremental improvement to radical surgery. But their near-simultaneous appearance suggests that the postdoc issue may finally be reaching critical mass among the nation's science policy elite."

The link address is: http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/05/05/5