How much does it cost to be a biologist? For some: an awful lot.

Science is an expensive endeavour. Whether research occurs in the lab, in the field, or at a computer, we have to buy equipment and pay for many different things that enable us to work in our discipline. Normally, research grants pay for these expenses. But this is not always the case.

Many of us have heard stories of people having to use their personal funds to pay for some of the costs of doing science (a phenomenon we discuss on social media with the hashtag #SciSpends). These stories take many forms.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

A supervisor refuses to pay per diems for students attending conferences. An early-career researcher uses their salary to pay for office furniture. A senior scientist pays a student directly, as it is faster than getting a grant to do so.

But is this practice widespread? And what types of costs do scientists incur to do research?

In this study, we conducted an online survey asking scientists who self-identified as biologists how much money they spent out of pocket that was not reimbursed.

We asked about a wide range of different types of costs, which are roughly broken down into those costs that would be incurred just once when starting a new position (e.g., relocation, buying office furniture) and those that were incurred over the past 12 months and are likely to recur (e.g., conference attendance or fieldwork costs). We also asked respondents to report their career stage, from undergraduate to senior scientist.

We found that the median biologist incurs US$2,700 in unreimbursed expenses to start a new position and spent US$1,680 over the past 12 months on things that would be likely to recur.

For all types of costs, we found that most people spent relatively low amounts, but a substantial minority incurred very high expenses. Further, we found that as a proportion of income, unreimbursed expenses are highest for those earliest in their career.

We cannot be sure that these results generalize to all biologists — maybe people who were most upset about this were more likely to opt in and do the survey. But our large sample size implies that this may indeed be a widespread issue, and one that could be having major impacts particularly for those individuals who experience very high costs.

The egalitarian ideals of science can only be realized if the discipline is inclusive, and that includes inclusive to people that are not rich. If some scientists have to incur big out-of-pocket costs, and others don’t, that is an obvious inequity that we have to fix.

Therefore, we argue that science needs a code of best practices to determine what should and should not be reimbursed within a scientific career — and those best practices should be applied widely so that everyone knows what they are getting into financially when they embark in a career in science.

Read the paper — SciSpends: an exploratory survey investigating nonreimbursed expenses in biological sciences by Brett Favaro and Edward Hind-Ozan.