Scientists for Labour’s new editorial board – accepting applications

The past eight months of this pandemic have seen a massive uptick in Scientists for Labour’s (SfL)’s output, as well as in our interaction with members of the shadow cabinet and Labour politicians more generally. In this time, we have produced over a hundred short policy documents (including daily COVID updates as well as specific briefings for MPs discussing various science-related topics), a series of fact-checks of Prime Minister’s Questions and Government outputs; countless questions for Labour MPs and Lords to ask in the Houses of Parliament, and upwards of twenty longer form reports examining issues related to COVID-19 and other scientific topics of relevance to politicians.

As we continue to produce an ever-increasing volume of output, we are moving towards what is essentially becoming a publishing house for Labour-focussed science policy. This is in no small part to our excellent volunteers, who have dedicated countless hours to applying their skills as scientists to provide lay-friendly summaries of evolving science, all on short timescales. We have benefitted significantly from peer review, thanks to experts in our team of volunteers who have donated similar amounts of their time to ensuring a high standard of rigour in our outputs.

With this increasing output, we are quickly beginning to exceed the capacity of our executive committee to handle these publications, which is becoming a bottleneck between our volunteers and publication of their work. As such, we have decided to create an SfL editorial board.

We are inviting applications to join our editorial board, with responsibilities for ensuring homogeneity and editorial rigour across our policy documents. This board will involve the creation of a clear and concise style guide for all SfL documents, developing consistent formatting and referencing guidelines that will present easy access to our source material from our outputted documents. The role will also entail editing documents for legibility and general flow and helping to ensure that documents created by multiple authors present a congruent summary of the appropriate research. We expect our editorial team to interface directly with MPs and other politicians, and to gain skills relevant to both an academic and a political career. As with all our work, membership of the editorial board will be voluntary and unpaid, but we expect the workload to be equivalent to a few hours per month.

If you’d like to join the team, please contact me at vcpolicy@sfl.org.uk with a couple of sentences explaining your suitability for the role. As in all our work, with a broad church of scientific experience and background we can best enable our work to meet the highest standards and continue to further the aims and objectives of SfL as a whole. I look forward to receiving your application!

Adam Thompson

Vice Chair (Policy), Scientists for Labour

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