Lab Life
A lab is a diverse ecosystem that only thrives when all members collaborate towards meeting both individual and shared goals. We share in our successes and our failures. Competition within the lab is discouraged.
Career Development
We will work to help lab members of all career stages identify, and then realise their professional and scientific goals. This includes providing opportunities to network with scientists in academic and/or industry, help organise meetings and lectures, select invited guests, assist with peer review, and grant-writing.
Lab Meetings & Feedback
Weekly lab meetings are an important part of working in the lab. Members are expected to attend every meeting and actively both provide and welcome constructive feedback to colleagues.
Giving and Asking for Help
You must make time to provide help to lab members when they need it. Conversely, if you find yourself stuck on a problem, first try to figure it out using Google/StackExchange etc. before approaching other members for help. This will help you learn quicker, and avoid wasting both your and your colleagues’ time.
Research Data Management
Keeping accurate records of your research (either in physical or digital form) is mandatory. Further, raw and processed data must be annotated, stored, and uploaded to repositories in a timely manner. Read KU Leuven’s RDM policy.
Publication & Authorship
Papers are an important currency in science and are often used to assess scientific contributions. We follow the KU Leuven Policy on Authorship when determining authorship contributions and author list ordering. Academic publishing is also a deeply flawed enterprise where the majority of publicly-funded scientific output is often out of reach of most people on the planet. To help change this system, we also follow Open Science principles wherever possible.
Lab members have the option to request formal discussion of authorship and authorship order, including the use of a dedicated Authorship Record Form provided by KU Leuven. Final decisions on authorship will be made by the PI.
Who is an author?
Basically anyone who contributes to the design of a study, or the execution of experiments, or the analysis of data AND makes a contribution to the drafting OR editing of a manuscript will be listed as an author. Other contributions will be acknowledged. Refer to the university policy for details.
Authorship order
The order in which authors are listed is an imperfect but widely used heuristic to gauge scientific contribution. Generally first and co-first authors are expected to have written the first draft of a manuscript. Corresponding/last authorship is reserved for authors who play a major role in Conceptualization, Supervision, and/or, Project Management. All papers will have clear contribution statements using the CRedIT taxonomy.
Our #EthicalPublishing pledge
All our original research articles will be published in non-profit/charitable journals, preferably as Open-Access with a CC-BY licence. (Rare exceptions might occur in the case of collaborative projects). All papers will be first published as preprints (Read Plan U). All research data and code will be shared freely, with the exception of protected IP. Read about KU Leuven’s Open Science policies.