Career Advice From Overleaf Founder John Hammersley #NJCE16

John Hammersley, the co-founder of our portfolio company Overleaf, is participating in a panel at the popular Naturejobs Career Expo, tomorrow in London. Aimed at early career researchers and students, his session is titled,  “How to succeed in careers in industry.”

To give you a taster of what he’ll likely discuss, John answered a few questions for us:

What made you decide to leave academia and launch your own business idea?

I recently took part in a Reddit AMA on this subject (online here), and this is the answer I gave to a similar question there:

It’s hard to remember the exact point at which I decided to leave, and there were certainly a number of factors that influenced it. But the number one reason was that: I felt like I wasn’t contributing anything useful; like my work wasn’t really making a difference.

There were so many papers appearing on the arXiv each day, I struggled to see how I was really contributing anything, and I felt a long way away from being able to really make a difference in my field. When I look back now, it’s because I now realize that I hadn’t given it long enough – I wanted to be able to see my work having an impact immediately but I was still learning a lot at the time.

But that was one thing that attracted me to working in an industry at the cutting edge (which turned out to be driverless cars) – not only would I still be doing research, but I’d be able to see the real world benefits almost immediately. That was a big driver for me (no pun intended!), and really motivated me to look to industry rather than to continue in academia.

I don’t regret my decision to leave, but having seen the developments in the field my research was in since I left, I do realize now that there were a whole lot of opportunities to contribute if I’d stayed – so perhaps I was lured a bit by the grass being greener on the other side. I’ve also been fortunate to have stayed very connected with science both whilst in industry and now a startup founder, which I’ve definitely valued.

My advice if you are thinking of leaving but want to stay connected to research is to find a company who’ll allow (and encourage) you to write papers as part of your job. It may also keep the door open if you want to go back (although that’s very hard to do, see one of my other answers!)

If you could go back in time and give your pre-startup self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

You’ll always be busy, so make sure to take the time to do the important things and don’t just fill it up with the little things.

Whilst I think I managed this to some degree, there’s always a temptation to “just do a bit more from the pile”, rather than taking a break and finding the time for friends, family, fitness, etc.

There’s a cool demonstration that explains this much better than I’m doing here.

How can you envision the landscape of scholarly communication changing?

As a mathematician / physicist, I was fortunate enough to do my research in a field where pre-prints are published on the arXiv as soon as they’re ready, and can then go on to be reviewed and published afterwards. To me this is a great workflow, as it allows research to be read early by colleagues in your field, whilst still allowing for subsequent review and update.There are now publishers in other fields starting to adopt this model, such as F1000Research[1] in the life sciences, who publish your paper immediately (after light-touch editorial review) and follow that with open, post-publication peer-review, and a rise in new pre-print servers such as bioRxiv, engRxiv and SocArXiv to name a few that we’ve been working with at Overleaf.

There are now publishers in other fields starting to adopt this model, such as F1000Research[1] in the life sciences, who publish your paper immediately (after light-touch editorial review) and follow that with open, post-publication peer-review, and a rise in new pre-print servers such as bioRxiv, engRxiv and SocArXiv to name a few that we’ve been working with at Overleaf.

With government and funder mandates now starting to require publicly funded research to be made open access (and where applicable, the data behind the results to be made open too), it feels like we’re moving to a more open model of research communication.

To anyone interested in finding out more about how they might go about being an “open researcher”, I recommend taking a look at whyopenresearch.org — this site is created and run by Erin McKiernan, a scientist who makes all of her work as open as she can. For additional perspectives, there are a number of stories published on The Winnower (https://thewinnower.com/keywords/arcs2015) on the theme of “the rewards of being open”, written by scientists in many different fields.

You can follow the Naturejobs Career Expo on #NJCE16 and @Naturejobs.