As a neuroscience postdoc at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, Letizia Mariotti was part of a core group of friends navigating the early steps of their careers. Even after the four friends scattered to academic posts across Europe they continued to meet virtually to talk through the challenges of launching a laboratory.
The key to a happy lab life is in the manual
It quickly became apparent that their duties as principal investigators far exceeded the bench skills that they’d learnt as postdocs. Mariotti, for example, struggled with the paperwork needed to hire her first international postdoc at the Institute of Neuroscience of the National Research Council in Padova, Italy. And one of her friends discovered that researchers in France embrace formal academic titles in ways that they hadn’t experienced in the United Kingdom. “You could never predict when something would happen that you’d never had to think about before,” Mariotti says.
The group collectively recognized that labs need a document that, rather than simply laying out methods and bench protocols, focused on culture and ethos: everything from where to access on-campus resources to intangibles such as a group’s shared mission and codes of conduct.
In 2024, Mariotti and her friends held the first of two workshops dedicated to creating such a manual — an effort that ultimately kick-started the Starting Aware Fair & Equitable (SAFE) Labs initiative. The resulting SAFE Labs handbook, now freely available online, is one of a growing number of resources dedicated to producing lab handbooks and making academia a more-supportive space. As researchers, institutions and funding agencies take notice of them, these documents are encouraging a collective shift away from unrealistic, and sometimes unhealthy, expectations in academia towards those that prioritize cohesion and support.
“These handbooks are for anyone who wants to create a positive and transparent lab space,” Mariotti says. “The interest and overall positive feedback we’ve gotten really attests to how much this kind of support is needed.”
The core tenets
Exactly how many labs, worldwide, have adopted a lab handbook is unclear, but anecdotally, sources say, interest is growing — partly thanks to the broader recognition that academia is due a change.
Scientists across the career spectrum are burnt out, and people are leaving careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in startling numbers, particularly those from under-represented groups.
Nature collection: Mentoring
In 2025, the UK Research Excellence Framework announced its intention to focus more heavily on initiatives that “enable positive research culture” — a move also shared by funders such as the biomedical charity Wellcome in London. Institutions have taken notice, too. The University of Liverpool and the University of York, both in the United Kingdom, have held workshops on lab handbooks. And University College London supported Mariotti’s workshops, allowing her group to survey researchers from across Europe to learn more about the challenges that researchers are facing while running labs in different countries and disciplines (E. Doná et al. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/qqdp; 2025).
At its core, a lab handbook should lay out the research focus and expectations for other members of the lab. Typical elements include which platforms a group uses to communicate, codes of conduct and harassment policies, and what students should anticipate in terms of expectations, mentorship and career development.
Several scientists say that reflecting on their own experiences as students helped while creating their own handbooks. Leonardo Uieda, a geophysicist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, recalls that his PhD lab lacked a sense of shared identity. “It was always each student for themselves,” he says. And although his experience was positive overall, he adds, “I do feel I missed out on the benefits of a cohesive group”.
For his lab handbook, Uieda worked with his team to set shared goals and to outline expectations. Students in his lab needn’t stick to conventional working hours, for instance, but they should attend weekly meetings and department seminars. He set different priorities for students and staff in the lab, and laid out a clear authorship policy for publications. “That’s one of the places I’ve seen the most conflict in my career, so I try to cover that really early on,” he says.
Letizia Mariotti and her fellow SAFE Labs founders: Pip Coen (back), Federico Rossi (front) and Stéphane Bugeon (left).Credit: Federico Rossi
Other academics embraced lab handbooks after experiencing a conflict that they wished they’d handled differently. Ben Marwick, an archaeologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, is committed to the concept of ‘open science’, for example, but acknowledges that following best practices to make science transparent and accessible to everyone can take time. At one point, he found himself on the PhD committee of a student who didn’t adhere to such practices. Bringing the student’s data into alignment with Marwick’s policies created a lot of extra work for them, Marwick says, including uploading their code into a new repository and annotating it so that it could be replicated.
“Ultimately, they weren’t sure if it was worth having me on their committee,” Marwick allows, noting that he could have avoided the issue if he had been clearer about his expectations or if he’d asked the student to complete a statement of expectation before Marwick joined his committee. Open science now forms a core part of his lab handbook, and Marwick says that sharing the document with potential students and collaborators has helped to rule out projects that don’t align with his values early on. “The longer I have it up, the more ways I’ve found it to be useful in navigating all kinds of professional relationships,” he says.
Making them your own
Beyond baseline expectations, lab handbooks might also contain sections that are specific to your research discipline. Some disciplines require fieldwork, for example, or rely heavily on particular types of data. Laying out clear guidelines about how lab members should conduct themselves, and how data should be handled and organized, can prevent future headaches.
