When ecologist Daniella Teixeira visited her bushfire-ravaged study site on Kangaroo Island, South Australia in February this year, the scale of the damage hit her hard.

Teixeira, an ecologist at The University of Queensland, Australia, felt numb and deeply sad as she set foot among the blackened trees and melted nest boxes that were once home to the black glossy cockatoos she studied during her PhD. The fires had burnt through one-third of the island since they started in December 2019.

“Going back to the sites where I did my research was the hardest thing,” says Teixeira. “It was like a graveyard.”

But Teixeira was unsure about where to seek support for the emotional toll she was experiencing. She was also discomfited to hear other researchers urging the community to focus on action instead of anxiety and sadness.

Writing grant proposals is often a painstaking and time-consuming task for researchers, particularly when the rejection letters begin to pile up. A 2013 study on grant proposals submitted to Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council found that researchers spend an average of 34 days working on each application, with a success rate of just 21%.

But there’s another option for researchers who find it difficult to obtain funding the traditional way: gathering donations from the general public.

While crowdfunding has long been a go-to source of capital for entrepreneurs and creative types, it’s gaining momentum as a way to finance scientific research, particularly among early-career researchers who are just starting to build their publication record.

Funding agencies should cut off grant money to researchers who have been found guilty of sexual misconduct.

That’s one of the recommendations from a panel of 21 US-based scientists calling for stronger policies to address sexual harassment and gender bias in science.

Their statement, published in Science, is in response to a 2018 US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report, which advised that sexual misconduct should have consequences as severe as those associated with research misconduct.

Be it a botched experiment or a coding error, mistakes are easily made but harder to handle, particularly if they find their way into a published paper.

Although retracting a paper due to an error may not seem a desirable career milestone, it is seen as important for building trust within the research community and upholding scientific rigor.

A 2017 study found that authors who retract their papers due to a mistake earn praise from peer-reviewers and other researchers for their honesty.