If you are going to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (#LPSC) next week, please take the time to reflect on the future #PlanetaryScience and to use the time at the conference to organize and prepare for the future.
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Science funding in the US and the future of #NASA are now more uncertain than ever. There will be fewer US students and postdocs, and there will be many foreigners who will not want to come to the US. The LPSC conference will probably never be the same again.
There are some community events that you should be aware of that are trying to resist the recent government and corporate interference in our field (the two are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish).
We have created the Planetary Research Cooperative non-profit association whose objective is to promote planetary science research to professionals and the general public. Communicating science to the public is increasingly important when anti-science sentiment is being normalized.
This non-profit will own and run a diamond open access journal that will publish planetary science research, with no fees for authors and no fees for readers. With dwindling funding, researchers should not continue paying exorbitant article processing fees.
This non-profit will also run a community #Mattermost server, a #Mastodon instance, and soon a #Peertube instance. These are free and open source alternatives to those developed by our tech overlords.
Independent of our work, there is also an initiative to create a professional society for planetary science that will advocate for the needs of our community. Surprisingly, the closest professional societies to our field today are in the fields of geology and astronomy.
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https://planetary-research.org
https://mattermost.solarsystem.social
https://mastodon.solarsystem.social