Occupational hazards and risk management in academic research: an emerging working population with unusual scenario

Since Vannevar Bush’s “Endless Frontier” 1948 report, academic research has greatly expanded its goals, well beyond training next-generation scholars and professionals. Long-term governmental and private funding, especially in the most developed nations, increased the number of academic workforces and of long-term, non-tenure track research professionals in academic and no-profit research institutions (Higher Education Institutions, HEI), especially, but not only in the STEM. An emerging working population with an unusual occupational scenario thus emerged in the late XX and early XXI century, spreading from traditionally advanced Countries to an increasingly large number of quickly developing ones. Academic workforce often overlaps with non-academic, especially in the STEM sector, which includes high-end healthcare and technological spinoffs. A new specific occupational scenario thus emerged, and makes the academic research workforce a specific population for which tailored protection of basic workers’ rights needs research-based evidence. Research in the STEM often involves work at knowledge frontiers, where materials, methods, equipment, are by definition not tested for safety, including new, previously unknown molecules, living organisms and techniques. Flexible occupational relationships have developed well beyond the traditional short-term mentorship. An increasingly large proportion of the academic research workforce is female in their life-determining passages that involve relationship, family building, childbearing. Academic institutions attract an ethnically and otherwise diverse young workforce that does not coincide with the traditional migrant working population. Awareness of entitlement to workers’ health protection may be limited especially for younger academic research workforce, due to specific characteristics of job relationships, such as fixed-term, fixed-project hiring, lack of protection in contracts, vertical and peer pressure. Top-ranked scholarly journals, such as the behemoths Science and Nature, often address specific issues in editorials and policy discussions, such as protection from physical and psychological harassment, demeaning, discrimination on non-professional grounds. Thus, the academic research workforce is twice “new and emerging”. First, this population of workers has been little considered or has been grouped, for risk assessment, in broader, poorly discriminating categories and job titles. Since the numbers are steadily increasing, it is worthwhile to address them better as a separate workforce from others that perform analogous tasks in different environments, such as in the corresponding industrial companies that necessarily adopt stringent safety and health management measures. Second, workers face specific risks that have not been addressed before, due to the novelty of the agents and of the scenarios. Traditional approaches to hazard assessment for new entities may fail due to the novelty of the involved materials and are not generally performed, basing on the assumption that very low amounts are produced and handled by a small number of trained and well-protected operators. Occupational hazards that can be efficiently tackled in different working compartments, such as physical, sensorial, mental and psychological stress from repetitive actions that need sustained and meticulous attention, cannot benefit from automation due to the reduced size of workload. Research in this field is thus needed to rationally address response to a phenomenon for which steady increase is expected in the forthcoming years.