More than 15,000 people have backed a proposal to create greater numbers of permanent staff positions in research laboratories to solve what the journal Nature calls “science’s broken postdoctoral system”.
The journal conducted a poll of its readers to accompany a feature on what it called the “postdoc problem”. The poll question was: “Some say that there are too many postdocs and too few permanent academic positions. What do you think is the best solution?”
About 20,000 readers answered the poll, with 15,265 voting for the option “create more staff scientist positions”. The other options were “pay postdocs more” (1,943 votes), “reduce the number of postdoc positions” (989 votes), “strictly limit the postdoc term to 5 years or less” (714 votes), “other” (732 votes) and “the situation is fine as it is” (171 votes).
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