Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Come and do research with us!
Björn Brembs October 13, 2020
doi:10.59350/5wfan-qh549
Trial and error is a successful problem-solving strategy not only in humans but throughout evolution. How do nervous systems generate novel, creative trials and how are errors incorporated into already existing experiences in order to improve future trials? We use […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Who’s responsible for the lack of action?
Björn Brembs September 3, 2020
doi:10.59350/sv44n-prn98
There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
The trinity of failures
Björn Brembs October 8, 2021
doi:10.59350/nenc2-h6h19
More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Academic publishing – market or collectivization?
Björn Brembs December 13, 2021
doi:10.59350/xwbvr-0sb24
Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
The ultimate Open Access timeline
Björn Brembs March 3, 2020
doi:10.59350/eew7n-8pg95
NIH, 1961: Journals are slow and cumbersome, why don’t we experiment with circulating preprints among peers to improve on the way we do science (Information Exchange Groups)? Publishers, 1967: You have got to be kidding. Nobody cares about improving science, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Small changes, big effects
Björn Brembs January 11, 2022
doi:10.59350/pbks8-38226
Sometimes, only small changes are required for potentially huge downstream effects. Last September, ten international experts have identified two key decisions that may help academia to break out of the decades-long lock-in with academic publishers: Regulators no longer granting academic […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?
Björn Brembs September 23, 2021
doi:10.59350/2gfb6-78483
According to a recent study, employee surveillance is rampant in today’s corporate work environment. This study documents how, often under the pretense of cybersecurity or risk analysis (sort of like academic publishers, actually), companies analyze the behavioral data they collect […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Prioritizing academic publishers
Björn Brembs November 22, 2021
doi:10.59350/57nsq-qn275
The debate over how publishers use the large “non-publication costs” (Fig. 1) that they incur and academic libraries, mainly, are funding has been going on for some time now. Above and beyond the cost items we discuss in our paper […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
The beginning of the end for academic publishers?
Björn Brembs June 2, 2023
doi:10.59350/t86vp-yt045
On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
What if Greta Thunberg took a Shell-sponsored professorship?
Björn Brembs December 15, 2022
doi:10.59350/4cfc8-20p25
Or let’s think a a few sizes smaller and imagine a renowned pulmonologist taking the, say, “Marlboro Endowed Chair” in the Mayo Clinic’s Pulmonary Medicine Division, sponsored by Philip Morris. What would they have to endure and how much credibility […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Open Access and the incentives for embezzlement
Björn Brembs October 24, 2022
doi:10.59350/fycw1-bjx50
Wikipedia defines ‘embezzlement‘ as “the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion of such assets”. Google defines it as “misappropriation of funds placed in one’s trust”: If one takes the position that researchers at public institutions are entrusted […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Off to Paris for #FENS2022 with two posters
Björn Brembs July 8, 2022
doi:10.59350/6xqsz-ryx80
The first conference after the Sars CoV2 pandemic! We’re headed for Paris, France tomorrow and our lab will present two posters, the work of graduate student Andreas Ehweiner and postdoc Radostina Lyutova. Andreas has been working on the cellular and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Scholarly societies partly to blame for post-truth age?
Björn Brembs September 12, 2022
doi:10.59350/93b9w-yq945
Reading the reactionary defense of the digital stone age in AAAS’ flagship magazine Science, I felt reminded of the now infamous “Make American Science Great Again” letter to Trump and all the other public statements by scholarly societies over the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
How about paying extra for peer-review?
Björn Brembs February 14, 2023
doi:10.59350/b9kn0-nwj49
There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Why publication services must not be negotiated
Björn Brembs March 30, 2022
doi:10.59350/b3n00-8a750
or: how journals are like 1930s Rolls Royce Phantom IIs Recently, the “German Science and Humanities Council” (Wissenschaftsrat) has issued their “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access“. On page 33 they write that increasing the competition […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Should you trust Elsevier?
Björn Brembs March 14, 2023
doi:10.59350/8m166-2a230
Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform. On […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
EU: academic publishers are monopolists
Björn Brembs April 1, 2022
doi:10.59350/gfr5v-b2t56
The market power of academic publishers has been a concern for all those academic fields where publication in scholarly journals is the norm. For most non-economist researchers, the anti-trust aspects of academic publishing are likely confusing and opaque. For instance, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Interacting learning systems at SfN22
Björn Brembs November 8, 2022
doi:10.59350/dq4aw-ydf49
I just sent the poster for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting to the printer. As our graduate student is preparing his defense and our postdoc did not get a visa (no thanks, US!), we just have a single poster […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper
Björn Brembs
@brembs  ·  activity timestamp 8 months ago
posted-content Front Matter
Scholarship has no time to waste
Björn Brembs March 31, 2022
doi:10.59350/r09cd-h6913
Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we may not have decades to get our house in order. The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics. Around the world, anti-science movements seek […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Download Read paper