Whither now, Open Access?
The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead,...
Read ItBjörn Brembs
Papers Published
Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?
In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions. At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may...
Read ItWhat goes into making a scientific manuscript public?
Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accept...
Read ItA study justifying waste of tax-funds?
Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions...
Read ItWhat should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?
For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I...
Read ItIs DIY really just for the scholarly poor?
Writing in the latest issue of Lab Times, Alex Reis portraits two sections of ‘do-it-yourself’ in the biosciences. One is the group of ‘citizen scientists’, some of which are organized in DIYbio. T...
Read ItWatching a paradigm shift in neuroscience
When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of ...
Read ItDissecting a fly's course control system
Until 1986, it was thought that so-called optomotor responses, i.e., the tendency of all animals and humans to follow moving visual stimuli with their eyes or their bodies, were a prerequisite for ...
Read ItHow Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data
Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science. After all, in this co...
Read ItBooming university administrations
This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do l...
Read ItIn which potatoes in France are like high-ranking journals in science
During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not e...
Read ItLibraries are better than corporate publishers because...
During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not e...
Read ItHow scientific are scientists, really?
In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next st...
Read ItThe cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle
Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they for...
Read ItHumanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits
Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis et al. entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural pe...
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