Project partner
Eurodoc, the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers, is a grassroots federation of 28 national associations (NAs) representing early career researchers (ECRs) in 26 countries across Europe. Eurodoc is a non-party, non-profit international association based in Brussels and was founded in 2002 to consolidate the community of ECRs in Europe. We aim to:
- represent doctoral candidates and junior researchers on education, research, and professional development;
- improve the quality of doctoral programmes and research standards;
- share information for ECRs, organise events, take part in debates, and shape policies on higher education and research;
- improve cooperation between NAs representing ECRs.
As representatives of early career researchers at European level, we develop policy proposals for ECRs, inform policymakers and engage with all major stakeholders in research and innovation in Europe. Much of our work is done in our working groups (WGs), which are open to all of our NAs and ECRs and focus on doctoral training, employment and careers, equality, interdisciplinarity, mobility, mental health, research integrity and Open Science for ECRs. Eurodoc organises regular international events for ECRs. We run a yearly Eurodoc conference as well as workshops and webinars. We are further involved in various local events for ECRs which are organised by our NAs such as summer schools. The three most important issues identified by Eurodoc for ECRs are:
- career development, especially for non-academic labour market,
- a lack of awareness on open science, what it is and how can be implemented,
- increased mental health issues in academia, especially in the case of doctoral candidates.
Eurodoc fully supports Open Science. We initiated an extensive program of producing informative articles (e.g. Open science for early-career researchers) and oral communications on Open Science for the Europe-wide network of ECRs. Interview series on Open Science are published on the Eurodoc website. We published 2 joint statements supporting Open Access via Plan S: a Joint response to the implementation guidance for Plan S and a Joint Statement on Open Access for Researchers via Plan S. We also responded to the Revised Guidance for Plan S. In order to raise awareness and support researchers, we organized training opportunities for ECRs in Open Science via Eurodoc Open Science Ambassador Training. In this project Eurodoc will be mostly represented by the OS Ambassador cohort. Currently there are 24 ambassadors, acting independently and as a European-level distributed team — http://eurodoc.net/ambassador-training/ambassadors-2019