Witnessing: tell your story

Telling your story can be a powerful way to share about the detrimental impact that autocratic regimes have had on scholarship and scientific progress. Stories could be about the way that research benefited you as an individual, or your community, showing what would be lost when autocratic regimes crack down on scholarly activity. Stories about how scholars have been threatened, censored, and/or directly harmed are also important to share and preserve. Ultimately, it is important for us to raise awareness of the benefits of scholarship and the harms done to scholarship under autocracies.

Telling stories can help others dealing with similar difficult circumstances. They can motivate others to take action. They also form a bridge between scholars in different places, affirming our shared values, denouncing injustices done to our peers, and this helps us find like-minded communities to build resistance to autocracy.

There are various initiatives that have been set up to capture different types of stories, which you may wish to consider submitting your story to:

• Public USA Research Benefits is a publicly searchable database about the societal benefits that came out of government-funded research in the US.
• #DefendResearch collects and publishes short testimonials from researchers on the impact of censorship on their work and the broader community.
• Science Homecoming provides links to local newspapers across the US to support scholars in producing opinion pieces about how important scholarly funding is to the local county. They also link to the stories written and published in these newspapers.

Other initiatives that have been previously organised to allow scholars to share their stories include:

• The Weather & Climate Livestream, which invited meteorologists or climate scientists who have been supported by US federal funding at some point in their career to share how their work helps the public and how funding cuts have threatened this.

What if I want to share my story anonymously?

If you would like to share your story anonymously through the SciBeh Saving Scholarship initiative (e.g., if you would face risks of having your name public), you can email contact@savescience.eu (please include "sharing a story" in the email subject line) to get help to publish your story anonymously.

This email uses a secure server that is located in the European Union.

When we receive emails, we will need to authenticate your authorship by verifying your status as a scholar or the scholarly activity you are sharing (e.g., we may ask you to provide URLs to institutional affiliations or scholarly pages such as ORCID or your publication record).

Stories will be published on a separate secure site so that there is no traceable link between the published story and the authentication process.

The team doing the authentication are scholars who are part of the SciBeh initiative.