With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19
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With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19
Björn
Brembs
October 17, 2019
Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the FoxP locus of Drosophila with anatomical and behavioral characterizations […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Unpersuadables: When scientists dismiss science for political reasons
Björn
Brembs
May 22, 2019
Scientists are used to vested interests disputing scientific claims. Tobacco corporations have tried to discredit the science about lung cancer and smoking, creationists keep raising always the same, long-debunked objections against evolution, climate-deniers claim the earth is cooling, anti-vaxxers believe […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Unpersuadables: When scientists dismiss science for political reasons
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Scholarship has bigger fish to fry than access
Björn
Brembs
October 14, 2019
Around the globe, there are initiatives and organizations devoted to bring “Open Access” to the world, i.e., the public availability of scholarly research works, free of charge. However, the current debate seems to largely miss the point that human readers […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
Scholarship has bigger fish to fry than access
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Is Open Access headed for a cost explosion?
Björn
Brembs
October 2, 2019
By now, it is public knowledge that subscription prices for scholarly journals have been rising beyond inflation for decades (i.e., the serials crisis): A superficially very similar graph was recently published for APC price increases: When not paying too much […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Elsevier now officially a “predatory” publisher
Björn
Brembs
December 11, 2019
For a number of years now, publishers who expect losing revenue in a transition to Open Access have been spreading fear about journals which claim to perform peer-review on submitted manuscripts, but then collect the publishing fee of a few […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Tagging and knocking out FoxP with CRISPR/Cas9
Björn
Brembs
July 16, 2020
The FoxP gene family comprises a set of transcription factors that gained fame because of their involvement in the acquisition of speech and language. While early hypotheses circulated about its function as a ‘learning gene’, a simultaneous “motor-hypothesis” stipulated that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Are Nature’s APCs ‘outrageous’ or ‘very attractive’?
Björn
Brembs
November 30, 2020
Last week, there was a lot of outrage at the announcement of Nature’s new pricing options for their open access articles. People took to twitter to voice their, ahem, concern. Some examples: There are many more that all express their […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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High APCs are a feature, not a bug
Björn
Brembs
December 9, 2020
There has been some outrage at the announcement that Nature is following through with their 2004 declaration of charging ~10k ($/€) in article processing charges (APCs). However, not only have these charges been 16 years in the making but the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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What sinister time machine?
Björn
Brembs
July 19, 2021
A recent OASPA guest post reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years now. What sinister time travel device is keeping some sections of the scholarly ecosystem from leaving the past and coming back to the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Why do academic institutions seem stuck in 1995?
Björn
Brembs
September 25, 2020
Until the late 1980s or early 1990s, academic institutions such as universities and research institutes were at the forefront of developing and implementing digital technology. After email they developed Gopher, TCP/IP, http, the NCSA Mosaic browser and experimented with Mbone. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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How academic institutions neglect their duty
Björn
Brembs
October 5, 2020
Think, check, submit: who hasn’t heard of this mantra to help researchers navigate the jungle of commercial publishers? Who isn’t under obligation to publish in certain venues, be it because employers ask for a particular set of journals for hiring, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Replacing the prestige signal
Björn
Brembs
February 4, 2022
tl;dr: Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Scholarly publishing in three cartoons
Björn
Brembs
March 10, 2021
The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat: we have a reproducibility leak an affordability leak a functionality leak a data leak a code leak an interoperability leak a discoverability leak a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Is the SNSI the new PRISM?
Björn
Brembs
October 26, 2020
Just before Christmas 2019, the Washington Post reported, based on “people familiar with the matter”, that the US Justice Department were investigating the Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan for potentially “working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Is the SNSI the new PRISM?
Björn
Brembs
October 26, 2020
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Can funders mandate institutions?
Björn
Brembs
January 6, 2021
For a few years now I have been arguing that in order to accomplish change in scholarly infrastructure, it likely is an inefficient plan by funding agencies to mandate the least powerful players in the game, authors (i.e., their grant […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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Minimizing the collective action problem
Björn
Brembs
May 12, 2021
Most academics would agree that the way scholarship is done today, in the broadest, most general terms, is in dire need of modernization. Problems abound from counter-productive incentives, inefficiencies, lack of reproducibility, to an overemphasis on competition at the expense […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...
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