"Non-scientists with pet theories should ideally be directed away from arXiv" www.nature.com/articles/d41... bioRxiv: "Hypotheses without new data...are considered out of scope and will not be posted" www.biorxiv.org/about/FAQ 1/n

"All major LLMs can be used to either commit academic fraud or facilitate junk science...guard rails are easily circumvented" Is anyone surprised? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Null results are essential to refutations [that] correct the scientific record...but data are not a democracy" www.life-science-alliance.org/content/9/3/...

Yes, a friend just underwent this, it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to go through, and I really wish RFK Jr would stop promoting horrific, dangerous lies about the HPV vaccine

Do low review response rates produce filter bubbles that bias fields? www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/l...

"little evidence retraction or editorial notice had any effect on the rate of citation" Perpetuating signals that a paper is flawed is critical. We need to do this better systemically. In other news, people don't read papers they cite... ht @deevybee.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

In my simple brain, it's exciting but you need to understand the limitations: cell free systems allow you to ask q's about molecules; in vitro systems allow you to ask q's about molecules & cells; organoids may one day allow you to ask q's about mols, cells, and tissues/organs - but never organisms

"ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation...we don’t know how [it] was trained...what is embedded into its models" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

TIL the German life science portal Livivo indexes preprints www.livivo.de/app/misc/hel...

This is one of the most interesting developments as it appears that authors are now submitting preprints earlier in the process. A reminder that our data suggests that the best time to post is approx 1 month prior to journal submission (which ~30% now are).

When you make the cover of a high-impact journal...

Huge spectrum of views on this. At one end, visions of a living 'article of the future' with embedded data in wondrous new formats. At the other, "just a PDF". What is most interesting to me is that someone's position on that spectrum does not correlate with how tech savvy they are. 1/n

Well then...

The age and experience discrepancy between (mostly junior) scicomm folks and (more senior) PIs explains a lot of this. Seeing how quickly projects rot when lab members leave disincentives any product that requires continual maintenance. Same goes double for software.

It could work well for for certain types of systematic review, big projects that are ongoing/evolving, work with teams not dependent on that career currency, etc. But most biomedical science is not (currently) like that, and much more than publication format would need to change for a shift there.

yep - I'm struck by the fact that "the living article" is a constant topic/aspiration in workshops on science communication I attend, but the vast majority of working scientists I speak to dislike the idea - mainly because it doesn't align with 'finishing' projects, people moving on, etc.

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv up. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version! It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Public service announcement, Authors: comparing your work to Einstein, Galileo, Darwin or Prusiner’s does not help your appeal. 1/2

"wars have been won and lost on the strength of maintenance..in Vietnam the US’s M16 was more precisely machined; the Viet-Cong’s AK-47s were crudely made but easier to fix, less likely to go wrong. Many American GIs lost their lives as a result of jammed M16s" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

It’s like concluding “my beer is half full, hence I have no beer”. No, you still have a beer, which is a lot better than having no beer.

It drives me crazy that most people think that COVID-19 vaccines don't reduce transmission. They don't bring Reff <1, but the difference between spreading an infection to 2 people vs 1 person is huge at the scale of the population.

Pretty reasonable summary of the state of COVID origin debate: what most experts think (zoonosis), where information is missing (some virology lab activities), what's clearly nonsense (cold chain), what's unsupported (deliberately made) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Manuscript checks are a time-consuming and oft overlooked aspect of the publication process [no reviewers do not "do all the work"...]. Automating these should reduce costs, but how good is the software? doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Did you miss the Dryad / SORTEE webinar during #LoveData26? Now you can watch speakers @richardsever.bsky.social of @openrxiv.bsky.social , Jennifer Meyer of @britishecologicalsociety.org Wei Mun Chang of @elife.bsky.social and Brooke Long-Fox of @morphobank.bsky.social on video 🧪

Grant writing is academia's least liked activity; most applications fail and time feels wasted. LLMs are therefore a huge draw, but if this means the number of applications increases 10-fold...

Twitter/X "promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media...algorithm substantially shifts attitudes towards more conservative opinions" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our preprint examining the specificity of human antibodies that cross-react with subclade K H3N2 viruses was posted this morning on medRxiv. These studies have implications on what vaccine strains should be selected for next year’s influenza season. 1/ www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Forecast: 13-17 inches of snow Code Blue: In effect Warming Centers: Open DSNY: 2,600 workers clearing streets every shift Salt spreaders: 700 citywide Emergency snow shovelers: 1,000 hired Plows: 2,200 ready to roll For updates: Text NotifyNYC to 692-692

Frank and honest stuff from @philipncohen.com - no easy answers here…

"For open infrastructure, the burden of AI harvesting is existential...a swarm of AI scrapers mirror entire collections, the cost of being open rises sharply...degraded performance for legitimate users, polluted metrics, staff time diverted to firefighting" www.digital-science.com/blog/2026/02...

One key aspect that made bioRxiv the most immediate and amazing source it is now was undeniably the science megaphone that Twitter was and that is no more. But I am hopeful that we can recreate that culture here on bsky, so do please share your science preprints and other here with all of us 😍👍

Can probably add excess water to this list.

"Prism wants me to work over there...[but] most projects happen where researchers have created their workspace...it’s easier to bring the LLM to the workspace, than to get researchers to change their workspace" 🎯 1/n generalizable point from @ianmulvany.bsky.social world.hey.com/ian.mulvany/...

An old favorite for this #FluorescenceFriday. This "rose" is actually a kidney glomerulus (red, podocytes) and an axon reaching towards it (green).

Challenges for open ecosystems as "first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild...raises serious concerns about agents executing blackmail threats" theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Data all the way down: How uncovering the data underlying research findings impacts every aspect of scholarly communication - webinar today at 12 pm ET events.humanitix.com/love-data-we...

This post has generated a super interesting debate between the authors of the paper @ebrahimfeghhi.bsky.social @nrhadidi.bsky.social and one of the authors of a paper they criticised @mschrimpf.bsky.social including an attempted reproduction of their results. This is such a great use of social media

"In our work, we found that none of the tested language models were ready for deployment in direct patient care." #medlibs www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"We believed contributions such as interactive articles and visualizations were held back by not being seen as real publications...we no longer believe this...the bottleneck is the amount of effort and the unusual combination of scientific and design expertise required" distill.pub/2021/distill...

That "ivermectin has become a symbol of resistance against the medical establishment among conservatives" is insane. Meanwhile "appalled...It’s absurd” isn't an NCI judgment one wants about a proposed study. Cancer folk, is there any justification for the study? kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

"If a plagiarized paper by an author who claims he didn’t write it disappears from a journal’s website with no notice, did it ever exist?" Yes - it'll have been downloaded, search engines will've indexed it. This is why bioRxiv/medRxiv do not disappear papers. retractionwatch.com/2026/02/05/j...

This New Yorker is not blaming the mayor for physics www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“No we can’t ‘just do [X]’. It’s more complicated than that”

Have I ever mentioned how surreal it is to be an Editor-in-Chief of a journal called Vaccine right now? www.science.org/content/arti... It’s pretty wild, at least by typical academic journal editorial office standards.

Exciting preprint from the @merz.bsky.social lab proposing how fidelity of membrane fusion is achieved #membranes #trafficking

7️⃣ chablis, frascati, merlot, retsina, riesling, cabernet, grenache, chardonnay, chianti, pinotage, sauternes, weißherbst, zinfandel. A set of zebrafish mutants with defects in embryonic hematopoiesis. journals.biologists.com/dev/article-...

"A living article...dynamic...instead of a static document, an evolving knowledge object that combines narrative with data, code, methods, and context" This idea comes up often, but IME scientists are rarely as enthusiastic about it as publishers... 1/2 scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/02/05/b...

Best articulated here by the JCS Caveman years ago journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

"Writing papers is rarely (probably never) the rate-limiting step in scientific research" Important to remember this. However painful writing is, however much more efficient we can make it, for experimental work it's the research that takes the time. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

"authors also express frustration at the amount of work expected for a single publishable unit, a concern we share (while humbly noting that it may not be held by the same authors when they serve as reviewers of other work)" <-THAT www.nature.com/articles/s41... ht @ritastrack.bsky.social