We also use very different methodologies though, so I guess i should qualify that my experiences come with that perspective in mind.
I can't readily MRI a brain or do an EKG via zoom. Injecting drugs or even having people take pills "might" be doable remotely, but it depends on the medication and in some cases that risk-benefit ratio is thrown off. The likelihood of an IRB signing off on me giving an experimental drug to someone not under our physical observation is....low. And rightfully so in my eyes. Even administering a computer task or collecting biospecimens comes with a lot of extra caveats if I want anyone near the level of precision I'm used to. I worry about degradation if the courier is an hour behind schedule, let alone if fedex loses the package for days at a time. For the type of work you do, I imagine most of these are non-issues. We've moved everything we can (consent, questionnaires, etc.) online, but that eliminates most of the data I actually care about.
RE: collaborations - I guess that speaks to my concern about what the unit of productivity is🙂 I would argue pubs are only one index and not necessarily the best one. It is also different working with pre-existing collaborators (unclear if yours was) as I think forming new collaborations is the bigger challenge. Not impossible. Just harder. How many additional collaborations would you have established if the pandemic didn't happen and would that work be any more innovative/impactful than what you did work on? That's more the question I'm asking and its a much harder one to answer. I don't know the answer, but certainly it has "some" impact. How the pros/cons shake out remain to be seen. We know publication rate won't go down and might even go up. We also know the overwhelming majority of scientific publications won't be read by more than a handful of people and will do little to move the field forward. Once we start trying to measure "impact" I think it becomes a much more difficult question.
The ableism piece is also an interesting and very significant one one. At a minimum, there are unquestionably now a far wider range of things that "can" be done remotely. What those are and when is it optimal vs sub-optimal is what I'm wondering. I don't think there will be an easy answer to that question. I do think it is much more difficult to make the case that such accommodations are unreasonable following this experience. I don't worry about individual researchers WFH for whatever reason. If the entire body of academics did it exclusively....personally I think that would severely hinder advancement as a whole (and effectively shut the doors on many entire disciplines that simply couldn't exist anymore). That's an instinct though and its an empirical question.
Yeah, it really does the depend on the methods for sure, which is why I said that there are some things that for sure can't be done remotely, so it varies. A big issue we see with accommodations, though--and we've touched on this some in our training work, and I've long wanted to write an article specifically addressing it, because it's a huge issue--is that people really struggle with distinguishing between "essential function" versus "that's how we've always done it." For example, I have a colleague who can't type for long periods of time d/t chronic pain, and got the feedback from some sites that she couldn't have a placement there d/t the documentation requirements, but really, she just needed speech-to-text software and a reasonably quiet space she could dictate in, because the essential function wasn't "typing notes" but rather "getting the notes into the computer," but that kind of cognitive flexibility is hard for a lot of people and leads to really good candidates being shut out, not because they can't do the essential function but because the decision makers don't know what the essential function actually is. I think we see the same thing with a lot of "we can't do that remotely" when the reason given is that "well, we haven't done it remotely before [and don't want to try]," not an actual reason why. Again, not in all cases--some things really can't be accommodated--but we see this lack of cognitive flexibility in accommodation denials a lot.
As for mentorship, I guess it's been productive on a lot of levels--producing research (that has been high impact, in terms of citations, community response and media coverage) and just having a really solid mentoring relationship overall. How you quantify mentorship outcomes is actually really interesting, and would be an interesting research topic--I have one professional mentor (also a distance mentoring relationship, actually) where we have some solid, objective professional outcomes (large grant [that we met through], some high impact papers) but the bulk of her mentorship to me has actually been more personal, helping me through really rough times I went through personally and medically while on the tenure track. She actually explicitly told me that she cared more about my health and well-being than anything that would actually benefit her (e.g., grants, pubs) in terms of a mentoring outcome. When I talked to here recently to thank her for all the invaluable support she gave me through the tenure process (seriously, I would not have gotten through it without her), to my surprise, she said that she felt like she "didn't have to do much at all, because [ I ] was a shoe-in and didn't need any help being an excellent researcher" whereas I was like "I leaned on you for support and reassurance so hard and I really owe my tenure to you," so it raises questions of what mentoring inputs and outputs are and what matters in that regard. Really interesting question that I now want to study, heh.
(Side note: I'm beginning to think I have a weird experience with academic impact, because I've had people tell me, for example, that my research has been one of the first times they felt like their experiences were heard and reflected, that it helped them figure out their sexuality after decades of confusion, that they used it to modify their training programs, that it fundamentally altered their clinical practice, etc--I mean, not every article is world-changing, of course, but I've never really felt like my academic work was in some vacuum).
