SciSpends: an Exploratory Survey Investigating Nonreimbursed Expenses in Biological Sciences

Socio-economic barriers to participation in science are harmful to the enterprise. One barrier is the phenomenon of scientists paying for expenses related to the conduct of research that are not reimbursed (which we termed “Scispends” for social media discourse). We conducted an online survey that asked self-selecting respondents to report the amount of money they spent on nonreimbursed expenses, including both costs incurred in the past 12 months and one-time startup costs associated with their current position. We received 857 responses that met criteria for inclusion and reported descriptive statistics summarizing nonreimbursed expenses across career stages. We found the median total of nonreimbursed expenses for the past 12 months was $1680 and the median one-time expenses were $2700, and that as a proportion of income these expenses were highest for those earliest in their careers. We found 13% of respondents spent more on unreimbursed expenses than they earned in a year. All cost categories were skewed, with most respondents reporting little or no expense, whereas a minority experienced high expenses. These results should be interpreted with caution due to survey’s exploratory design, but they suggest that formal surveys should be conducted by scientific societies, funding agencies, and academic institutions to properly assess the causes of nonreimbursed expenses and determine how this barrier can be minimized.