Episode 4: Daniela Saderi

Daniela Saderi, co-founder of PREreview, advocates for inclusion, collaboration and equity in peer review.

About Daniela

During her PhD, Daniela Saderi noticed the systemic issues present in traditional scientific publishing. As an activist and champion of early-career researchers, these inspired Daniela to co-found PREreview, which aims to transform peer review into a more constructive and equitable process. In this episode, Daniela discusses the importance of collaboration and community engagement in science, as well as her own journey through academia and time as a Mozilla Fellow. 

Daniela holds a PhD in neuroscience from the Oregon Health & Science University, USA, and is the Executive Director and co-founder of PREreview. In this episode, she mentions OSCDnet and the Open Science Manifesto, an inspiring project that still lives in the memory of the Knowledge Equity Lab 

Transcript

Milly McConnell (intro): Welcome to eLife Community Voices, the podcast shining a spotlight on the remarkable individuals behind research. Join us each episode as we feature personal stories that reflect the changing culture of research. We're here to shed light on the remarkable achievements and challenges faced by those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge.

Godwyns Onwuchekwa: Welcome to eLife Community Voices. My name is Godwyns Onwuchekwa, I'm the Head of Communities at eLife and I'll be your host for this episode. 

So, my guest today is Daniela Saderi, the co-Founder and Chief Executive of PREreview. Daniela has been in the forefront of changing things and finding a way to make science communications more equitable, diverse and very inclusive. So it is a pleasure to have Daniela here today, she's a super, super impressive and insightful person. In fact, the good thing today is that I'm interviewing someone that I also admire. Daniela, you're welcome.

Daniela Saderi: Thank you so much. That is way too generous.

Godwyns: So, Daniela, you know, when I approached you for us to do this, I did it because I wanted to share the inspiration that makes you do what you do, the dedication and the commitment you have as an advocate for DEI, as someone who champions the voice of those who are minoritised. But before we get into that, I want to sort of talk about the background. I know you have a PhD in neuroscience, you moved to the US at some point in your life. So could you tell us a little bit around this, you know, your journey through academia for yourself? 

Daniela: Yeah. Yeah. So I have a bachelor's degree in molecular biology that I got in University of Milan. So I’m Italian – if my accent hasn't given it away already. So I was born in Sardinia, I was raised in Sardinia, and I always had a passion for science and, you know, went to college as a first person in my family actually going to college. It was, you know, something that probably was discouraged at some point. They were like, “why aren't you going to start working?” You know, that kind of old mindset.

But I've always loved to study and after getting my bachelor, I was going to go on and continue to do genetics and molecular biology – has been always very interesting to me. But kind of six months through my Masters I was a little bored to be honest, because I had already kind of, I felt like I already studied those things. And it happened that I was reading a book on neuroscience by Eric Kandel, who's a Nobel Prize for neuroscience, and got, you know, really fascinated. I don't know, “how the brain works”, sounds like a little bit too much, but I was really intrigued by all of the techniques and what I was looking at. 

After my masters, I was going to go and get a PhD in Germany. I was very fascinated with the auditory system and sensory neuroscience in general. But, I met my husband in Genoa during an internship after my masters. Getting married was easy! After knowing my husband for three months he proposed, which is unusual. He's an engineer with a very stereotypical thinking, like mind, of an engineer. Like, he calculates or he thinks about all the you know – we're playing chess and he's like 20 moves ahead and like, that's not how my brain works. For that though he was very spontaneous. He didn't plan that.

I graduated from my master's and we went to Sardinia. He just met my parents. He just met my grandmother who doesn't speak English, even though she lived in Canada as a migrant for 13 years. She came to my ear after meeting him for like an hour and she's like, “this is the one.” And I'm like, “what?” It's like, you don't even understand what he's saying!  

He is from the US and he was doing his PhD in robotics at the time. And you know, he's like, “I don't know, let's check out what it would be like to do a PhD in the US.” And I had no idea. I'd never been to the US before. But yeah, during our honeymoon, which we did without much money, just like on a road trip through the US, I stopped in Portland, Oregon, and there was a laboratory and a professor that I really admired, and I emailed him and I was like, “can I stop by?” 

And I did, and he basically set up an interview with members of the graduate program committee without telling me. So I was doing an interview without knowing. And so it was very – actually worked out really well because I wasn't nervous at all. I was presenting my data from my masters and then they were like, “Okay, the applications are due in a month and now you just have to do the GRE and the TOEFL.” And I'm like “the GR what?” Basically, I studied for the rest of my honeymoon and got a very low score in that stupid GRE. But they didn't care, thankfully, so I got an offer for getting into grad school in Portland, Oregon, and I've been here ever since, since 2012.

Godwyns: This is quite an interesting journey. And you know, for me, with my own personal experience being a migrant too, I can see the power behind that. And because as a migrant, every day counts. You want to get something done every day. You want to achieve something, not in a way that you know is pushy, but you know that you have something to do. So I can see where that has come from. But tell me, you know, at some point you were with Mozilla as a Mozilla champion. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Daniela: Yeah. So, I started my PhD in 2012, so it was about 2016. I wasn't really sure I wanted to continue doing my PhD. You know that mid-PhD crisis a lot of people have. And I was like, “is this really what I want?” I was looking for more meaning in my life. And you know, life as an academic and early career could be very isolating. And, you know, I was looking around for opportunities and things to do and I found like a little flyer to apply for a travel award to attend Open Con, which was an open science conference. And I didn't know what open science meant, so I went. 

I was in DC with 300-plus early-career professionals, including researchers, but lots of librarians. And I, just that conference, I think, was kind of the moment in which – the starting point of everything else that happened afterwards in my life because I was like, “Okay, here there are people who are activists in the space of science.” And I never put those two things together in my brain. I was like an activist in my personal life. And then I was like, “and then I do science.” And the two things were separate. And I think that, retrospectively, I have been trained to think that way. And so, in that moment I was like, “Oh okay, there is something I can do within, you know, being in a scientist.” And so that was kind of what changed. 

And from there on I kind of continued to look for opportunities to kind of engage and learn more about open science and learn more about preprints and kind of I could talk more about PREreview. But Mozilla was engaging with researchers and scientists and kind of understanding how there is activism that can be brought into science and specifically in the context of open science. And so I applied for a fellowship. They had Mozilla Open Science fellows at the time and I got it. And so that was an incredible experience. At the last year of my PhD I was supported by the Mozilla fellowship, which, you know is amazing because it bumped my salary from being like minimum wage as a student to actually have, you know, like opportunity to travel and being supported by Mozilla. So I finished my PhD travelling a lot and I was very, very grateful to have an advisor, Dr Stephen David, who allowed me to do that. And that opened my mind to learn more about other people and the work they were doing, and also supported the work that I was doing at PREreview. So then I graduated and then started at PREreview full time from there on.

Godwyns: So, let's jump into that PREreview because there's no way we can talk about you without talking about PREreview. Can you tell us, can you tell the audience how this happened, why this happened, what is PREreview and all of that story?

Daniela: So at Open Con, Dr Jessica Polka, who at the time was the director of ASAPbio, which is a non-profit organisation promoting the use of preprints in biology. At the time, I had never heard about preprints, and so coming back to, you know, my PhD life, I was like, “what is one thing that I can do to support this movement?”

And preprints to me were kind of an obvious choice because I was running a journal club. So for my department I was kind of organising a weekly get together to review a manuscript. And, usually, what ended up happening is that we would choose a manuscript published on, you know, a high-profile journal and then spend an hour sort of tearing it down. Like saying, you know, all the faults in this published, peer-reviewed piece of research and kind of this attitude of wanting to tear down instead of being constructive. And for a while, again, I didn't notice that. And then I started noticing this and I'm like, “wait a second, this is just not cool. Also, like, it's wasteful. Like we're here talking about something. It's already out there. It can’t be changed.” And so preprints kind of gave in my mind this opportunity to actually shift that discussion to something more constructive, but because there is something we can still do about it.

So, you know, to me there was a lot of good stuff that could come out of discussing preprints in journal clubs and then through Mozilla and Open Con, I was part of a committee that hosted Open Con Cascadia. So kind of a satellite event of Open Con in Portland and invited people to come and talk. And then there was like another kind of Mozilla science panel. I invited Samantha Hindle, who was a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF and who was also an ASAPbio fellow. And I met Sam and she and I just started on and on about how preprints are cool and what we can do with journal clubs and what we were learning. And we were like, “why not just try to write resources to make other people see what are the advantages?” I was getting invitations to postdocs’ interviews as a result of reviewing a preprint and sharing it initially via email and then as a comment on bioRxiv for example – whenever it was possible sharing it openly. And I was like there is a lot of advantage here for early-career researchers to get into that. You get to learn how to be constructive, you get connections and you get an opportunity to really like do things more with others in a way that it's again, I think it's more within what a scientist thinks that they want to do when they begin this career in science, which is add knowledge and improve the world rather than tear people down.

The day that we met, it was the last day for a Mozilla mini grant and it was up to $5,000 to support something, you know, and we were like, “okay, can we do this?” Like, you know, we have like a day and we wrote a mini grant to get enough money to pay 20 laboratories around the world to run a preprint journal club. And we would give them money to buy snacks, pizza, drinks so that graduate students would come, right? That's what motivated me to go to meetings at that time. And we got it and we got the mini grant. And that was the very beginning. And then Sam and I just started, you know, drawing a logo or figuring out what name we would give to this thing and kind of the rest is history. We met Monica Granados, who we consider as the third co-Founder, just about maybe nine months after I met Sam. And the three of us have been starting what PREreview is today.

And of course that was the origin story, you know, of PREreview. But right now the team is much bigger. There are five full-time people at PREreview plus an amazing advisory committee, and I do want to mention their names because they are very much who makes PREreview going and interacting with the community. And it's Vanessa Fairhurst who is our Head of Community; Chad Sansing, who is our Head of Product; Chris Wilkinson, our Head of Technology; and the recently new add to our team, Grace Park, who is the Communications and Engagement Officer at PREreview. And there wouldn't be any PREreview work now without them, so I'm very grateful for that.

Godwyns: PREreview is very well recognised now and I think as someone who works closely with early-career researchers, I know that PREreview holds a place in many of their hearts really, because many of them have benefited from it, from the events and all the training that they get to take part in. So it is a very important player in the industry, especially towards the transparency and of course inclusion because that's one of the key things that we know, that science or the entire scholarly communication has been very, very homogeneous to a very large extent. So having resources like PREreview has been very useful. So thank you for that.

Daniela: I mentioned before how that ‘a-ha’ moment of figuring out that science is not this entity in the vacuum that is objective and reflects away all other problems of society – that's kind of like very embedded in what PREreview is. I think what's motivating me to continue to do PREreview and now more than ever and motivating, I think, people in our team and our community, is this realisation that there is no open science without an equity focus. There is no change without really thinking about what are the issues that got us where we are, what are the structural and societal issues? And they are in science. Everything that we do is embedded in this. It's a systemic issue and those are definitely in the process that we do publication, that we do review. And so what we are trying to do here again, preprints are kind of a substrate for a bigger change that we want to see, right. Preprints allow anyone to do evaluation, right? And that's what we're trying to do with the platform.

But really I think what I would love to be able to convey more is the change that we see in the future is a change that doesn't need preprints. But it's a change in the attitudes that we have, in the systems that we have, in thinking about “who are the people that we call experts?” And “why is someone an expert versus not”, right? And so homogeneity is very much part of history. And how, you know, people have been disenfranchised and treated as commodity. And science has done so well and so much unfortunately, to legitimise oppression through the history. So we try to bring a little bit of that history in our training. And sometimes people are like, “why are you talking about this in, like, a peer review training? Like I'm here to learn about how to write a review.” Well, because that's the way – what you bring to your writing your review is rooted in that history. And so like trying to think about that to me is the most interesting part of our work. And it's hard and I think there is so much more that we want to do. But there is no open science without really understanding the context in which science has evolved. There is a lot, still a lot of work to do.

Godwyns: Yeah, you are right. It is a general dilemma for the human race in every way.

The socialisation that people get puts us in a situation where sometimes we are quite, well, nonchalant about what happens. And this is, you know, the whole notion that has been behind many atrocities that we've seen over history. When we don't mind that millions died on the sea as long as they produced sugar. When we don't mind that women are being beaten to death as long as they farm the field.

So what you're doing is very useful in that aspect because it is, as you said, it must be hard because you're trying to change people who have gone through at least 20 years of socialisation, of believing that this is how things work. So you're suddenly trying to say to them, “but we could do it differently.”

Daniela: And of course, it's like, what does slavery have to do, or what does, like, any of this old quote–unquote history of oppression have to do with scholarship? It's a leap that I myself didn't – and I'm still learning, right? I have to still, like, unlearn those old pathways in my brain that lead me to think in a certain way and rethink and say, “oh, actually, wait a second, that's not.” So like constantly checking what, you know, many people may refer as biases, but really are my beliefs that have been rooted in my brain from, you know, when I was a child and everything that is around me and unlearning those and especially now that we live in this moment in which all of those things are re-legitimised again, it is so important to look back at our history, the intersections. And again, science has played a huge part in it. And so understanding that and how it's our responsibility to change moving forward – it's a lot of work and I think that there is no change without work and that systemic oppression is everywhere in every bit of our life. Whatever is your job, there is a place for you to push for change. So like, that's kind of something I need to remind – and I have, I'm fortunate to have people around me that help me remember that.

Godwyns: But I think something poignant that you just said now is that realisation and self-introspection which you also go through from time to time and the humility of accepting that, you know, I am also still learning in this journey. And this is why you're inspirational because you do all these things with a lot of humility, with a lot of openness to hear other people's context.

I want to take you back to something you said earlier on when you discovered open science or open practices. This is important because you made a sentence earlier, you said, “we cannot do this without talking about equity.” So, one thing is open science. That open science without equity will never work. So tell me about that moment of realisation. 

Daniela: Yeah, that was definitely my realisation. I didn't get to that on my own. I think the very first time that it at least clicked in my head was attending a conference called ElPub that was hosted in Toronto, and one of the main hosts was Dr Leslie Chan. And he is a professor at University of Toronto, and he was Director of the Knowledge Equity Lab. He and his collaborators at the time, Dr Angela Kuhne and others were looking at the intersections – first of all, like just redefining and talking about “what does – why open science,” and thinking about scholarship, “what is knowledge,” and really asking more of these kind of deep questions, right? Rather than saying like, “okay, we got science and now let's think about how we open it up,” which is what a lot of open science has been about, like access to research, which is a really important part. But he was bringing the, like, how do we again – kind of looking backwards and say like we can’t look forward without really understanding how we got here. And the grants were very much about, you know, the first grant we got, the very first big grant was with the Sloan Foundation. And I owe the Sloan Foundation a lot, specifically Josh Greenberg for believing in us. But what they really wanted to see is like, “okay, you talk about a platform that you want to build for anyone to review preprints.” So we were talking about that too. But again, I think that the most important part was like all these kinds of epistemic questions that we had.

So yeah, I invite everyone to check out the work that Dr Leslie Chan and also specifically something that unfortunately is a project that is sunsetted now is the Open and Collaborative Science Development Network – OCSD Network – and the Open Science Manifesto, which they had a whole project and video when they worked with 26 countries in Latin America and Africa and the Middle East and Asia to really understand how open science can connect and really like improve the issues of these communities. So, it was a great project that inspired me a huge deal and I wish that, I wish it was still alive, but it's still alive in my heart for sure.

Godwyns: I saw a quote somewhere you wrote “when I look at the world today, I see opportunities to use collective intelligence in ways that were never possible before.”

Daniela: I think just the possibility, you know what – the internet. I think I was a Mozilla fellow, but really thinking about, it's not a deep thought, but like they think about  how the internet can connect us and how much easier it should be to break up silos. And so I think in the context of scholarship, for example, and peer review is very much thinking about how do we create a world in which peer review doesn't just happen between, like, my colleague expert that has been identified as the most influential person or whatever, like in that specific field. But how do we actually understand where our research goes beyond and really welcome feedback from people with lived experiences?

So I'm going to make an example. So I – my PhD thesis was on auditory processing. And so I was studying, it was basic science just looking at how neurons in the brain connect and how attention shaped the way that we perceive sound. So sounds very abstract. But when we wrote a grant about that, when we wrote, like, the introduction of a paper, it was always going back to deafness and how our work would be somehow making it easier to create, for example, algorithms for hearing aids because we needed to make that connection in order for people to care. Or at least we thought so. Looking back, a lot of the language we were using was very ableist. It was very like, “oh, deafness is a number one disease in the world” and all that. And we had zero connection with the deaf community. Like zero connection understanding about what their experience was. Why is that? Why is my work reviewed by people that also have zero connection to that? And like if we're really, truly intentional we want to do that, we should have that community being with us, guiding what we're trying to look for. Is that even something that they care about or they want?

And this is just an example, but I really want to see – and I think this is the dream with PREreview – is like, can we, you know, live in a world in which when we are creating something together, it's through co-creation and it's through like lines of humility of like, yes, maybe I studied for 20 years to do this particular piece of research, but I have zero experience with what I'm doing. Can we work together and how would that even work?

Godwyns: The whole of this is summarised in another thing that you know you are a community builder. You are someone who likes to bring people together and work together to solve something, a problem. But I think you have mentioned there are challenges and there must be. And this is one of the things that sometimes, for those of us who are outside looking at other people, we don't see the struggles and the difficulties and the hurdles, but you know, there must be challenges.

Daniela: Oh my gosh, so many challenges. When we started PREreview, we were all three of us still in research. Monica Granados and Sam Hindle, they were still postdocs and I was a PhD student. And then I became kind of a full time on PREreview and directing this project. And I think that, you know, some of the challenges there were just this growth. It was very slow, right? I've been the only full-time person for four-plus years. But this also kind of understanding, like I've got zero training in anything I was doing. Like, none of the hats that I was wearing as a project quote–unquote leader were something that I have been trained for, or at least that I thought I was trained for. Like it was just like figuring out from others.

So I think that the challenge has been that, you know, doing the things and learning on the job and failing a lot with others, but also like this transformation in which, you know, then we hire the first two people to work with us and it's like, oh, suddenly it's like it's more than just me and Sam and Monica doing this on the side. It's kind of growing the impact. And even if it's slow, it's actually, it is. We are receiving real life – real people are writing to us and saying how the work that we're doing is affecting them. I think, I don't know if I want to say a challenge, but it's also an opportunity there is to really want to push more for like learning, understanding how  PREreview can grow and in a way that is sustainable. And so we're really thinking about the sustainability of the project – not just financial, which is important and we're not there yet – but really the sustainability of the work that we do so that we are not the bottleneck for it to happen because anything can be destroyed very easily, right? Right now, like so easily, right? Years and years of change can be destroyed just like a person going on and signing a bunch of paper. So it's like, how do we build our legacy so that even if we have to close or pause or hibernate, resources are still available? People that want to get engaged are still empowered or have some sort of scaffolding infrastructure to continue the work within their local communities if they want to. So I think that that is a big challenge.

And so when we think about growth, it's very much about trying to decentralise a little bit of what we do. But within the values – just create strong foundations of values that others can build upon, transform and adapt to their own communities. So you know, right now we are super excited about a whole, like, next year of localisation and translation into Latin American languages. So, Latin American Spanish and Brazilian-Portuguese over our resources and website and processes. And I'm really excited about working with the community and a group of professional interpreters and translators that really have a focus in language justice to understand it's much more than just translating, right? AI can do the translation, but it's really working with the community to understand how can this be supportive to them and also learning from them.

Godwyns: And of course, part of the focus of this discussion with various scientists is to inspire those who come behind to see that there's work being put in individually. That all of these amazing people are human who go through the same situation like others. So what would you tell those who are coming behind?

Daniela: The change that you want to see can be brought in any little thing that you're doing. This concept of “small is all” that Adrienne Maree Brown talks about in Emergent Strategy is this concept of fractals, and how the little change that we're doing at a small level does impact to the big change. And I think that a lot of people want us to think that we are a small pond, insignificant in the bigger scheme of life. And it's not true. And if we need to find people to remind ourselves of that, find those people. And I have some people around me that are helping me right now be reminded of that. And one of them is Dr Antoinette Foster. She is an incredible human being and colleague. And I had a recent conversation with her and she reminded me of that like, you know, you're right. And so like go back to those values and build your people around you that can be there to remind yourself when you get lost and you can be that for themselves. 

And again, as young researchers, we are told so many lies. Like I was told when I started my PhD, “I'll make sure that you publish just by yourself, just you and your PI, so that you'll show the world that you can do it all.” But I couldn't do it all. I couldn't – it's like that was a lie. Like, why would I want to push for that? Like, if anything, I actually wanted to find more collaborators. I am best at doing this part of the work. You are best at doing that part. Let's figure out how we put it together.

Godwyns: That feels like a good place to end this episode. Thank you Daniela for your time and for sharing those experiences and the inspirations behind them. And the struggles as well, you know, owning up to them. 

That's all for this episode of eLife Community Voices. I hope you've enjoyed it and that you will join us again as we speak to researchers from across the globe about the human side of science.

Milly McConnell (outro): That's all for this episode of eLife Community Voices. I hope you've enjoyed it and you'll join us again as we hear more about the human side of science. To stay up to date with our community, you can follow us at eLife Community on Threads and X. Thank you once again to the Communities team at eLife and Neil Whiteside at freedom:ONE for editing this episode. Thank you for listening and see you next time.