No deal with #SpringerNature Switzerland has been without an agreement since 1.1.2026. Consequently, the SNSF is pausing funding for #OpenAccess articles in these journals. This joint measure with the 🇨🇭 higher education institutions strengthens our negotiating position. ℹ️ Info : sohub.io/a8rh

Should funders mandate where grantees can publish? Probably not. But funders could mandate where grantees cannot publish. 🧵 1/11

Well done Swissuniversities! @snsf.ch et al. once again leading the charge (see previous special issue announcement). Funders and institutes hold the cards. If they don't pay the profiteers, we researchers will just adapt. We don't need Nature. Nature needs us. #SciPub #ResearchIntegrity

🎓 #swissuniversities didn't reach a deal with #SpringerNature, so it is recommending 🇨🇭researchers to not publish nor review for any journal of that publisher. Uni funding was cut? rethink where your APCs went: ✅ reinvestment in science from society journals OR ❌ to €2M revenue for Springer? 1/🧵

Influence a change in behaviour where authors are encouraged by their universities to no longer publish with an entire suite of journals since the APCs aren't covered. Authors find new, non-Springer journals, life goes on.

Yes, we should have stopped playing years ago! But the inertia is very strong. There are just too many young researchers who aspire to have someone say “in their Nature paper” referring to their work!

Happy to highlight an essay I wrote together with @marcdemanuel.bsky.social, @natanaels.bsky.social and Anastasia Stolyarova, trying to think through what sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪 Explainer🧵👇1/n

The academic evaluation system is obsessed with “papers”: citable, immutable objects, demonstrating a person’s contribution to science and forever associating the authors’ names with a journal name. PDFs are great, but we have somehow decided to stop innovating because of this obsession.

Happy to hare that the preprint I was advertising below has been published by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology: academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-... Thanks @jevbio.bsky.social for supporting responsible publishing!

Delighted to publish Forum Article by @nicolasgaltier.bsky.social et al: "Journals run by learned societies or universities have more ethical policies while being cheaper and similarly cited" doi.org/10.1093/jeb/... Thank you for choosing JEB - we encourage the support of #societyjournals

SMBE2026 Symposium 11 | The evolution of recombination landscapes 📨 Abstract submission smbe2026.org/abstracts 📋 Programme details smbe2026.org/programme #SMBE2026

"This decision by the CNRS will help the organisation save €1.4 million annually in subscription fees, funds that will be redirected towards initiatives promoting open science, particularly the development of open databases." YES! #scientificPublishing

I'm excited to present this new model to detect positive selection on regulatory sequences, which has been 3 years in the making! Thanks to Alexandre Laverré and @Phylogenetrips for their amazing work on this project. 😃 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.26.690685 #bioinformatics #MolecularEvolution

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

New preprint from our lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...! Andrea Dos Santos and Clément Vulin combine experiments and models showing how adding glucose can strengthen negative interactions between microbial species. This can be used in tandem with antibiotic treatment to inhibit pathogens!

DAFNEE, a useful database of academic-friendly journals in #Ecology and Evolutionary #Biology academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Le 1er janvier 2026, le CNRS coupera l’accès au Web of Science, Core Collection et Journal Citation Reports. Une nouvelle étape de sa politique en faveur de la science ouverte pour promouvoir des alternatives ouvertes, transparentes et responsables.

Since AI slop is again all over Scientific Reports, a thread on the economics of grey-zone publishing. Why does slop keep getting published? What does it mean for science? How can we stop this? Background readings: Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

Great opportunity for those interested in fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and mathematical models: postdoc opening in Laurent Lehmann’s group @unil.bsky.social. We have a lively community of theorists here in Lausanne with good interactions across groups. Join us ! Please RP

🎓🧪🔬🔭🧫 If you are still publishing in for-profit journals, ask yourself: what have those journals done for you? Or for science? Publish, cite and review in society journals!

It all boils down to this! If we believe in science and the peer-review process in its broader sense, why wouldn’t we always choose to send our work to respectable non-profit journals from scientific societies that do a great job in the review process?

***Super cool-project alert***⚠️ Come work with @dirkmetzler.bsky.social and me in trying to understand how transcriptional noise evolves in a phylogenetic context 🧬 Deadline 15th Dec 2025 (Project funded by @dfg.de @gevol.bsky.social)

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

Academic publishing is broken due to for-profit actors. Time to explore alternatives as researchers → A Diamond Open Access conference, Feb 5-6, 2026 in Nijmegen NL. Free registration (limited seats): horizondiamond.nl Let's build a sustainable publishing infrastructure together.

Fantastic paper, fantastic thread - thank you, Juan and colleagues, for this great contribution to GBE!

Very proud to share our perspective on "The Genomic Kaleidoscope" doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... out @genomebiolevol.bsky.social Precious collaboration w/ colleagues across the world, led alongside the amazing @mbrasovives.bsky.social and the one&only @jrotwitguez.bsky.social Check out his great thread!

80 download of my checklist of actionable items for any researcher to adopt to support an equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing landscape zenodo.org/records/1741... Still need to do this myself, but I'd love to see printouts on office doors or hallways ;) #AcademicSky #OpenAccess #DiamondOA

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤 If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 10/10

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Let's get negative about scholarly publishing – a new paper (first in a long time for me!) on proposals to tackle the problem of publication bias that emerged from a NINDS workshop held in May last year. occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2025/... [Direct link to paper: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

After 6 (healthy) months of hiatus from social media, first post with a brand new conference announcement!! 🔥COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY IS EVERYWHERE! Join us in Lausanne for the first international Computational Biology Symposium! 18-19 September 2025 Registrations are OPEN! cbiosymposium.unil.ch

Our latest paper revisits Haldane 1957 on speed limits to adaptation, the paper that triggered neutral theory. We clarify and then significantly extend the theory, and apply the resulting model to @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social's data doi.org/10.1093/gene... 1/14

1/35 New paper out! @jamesTstroud and I dive into why long-term studies are crucial for understanding evolution. They reveal processes impossible to detect in short timescales and capture rare events that transform our understanding of evolutionary dynamics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New lab paper in press: crossover dynamics have different genetic bases in female pigs. RNF212 is associated with crossover rate and interference, but... SYCP2, MEI4 and PRDM9 are associated with crossover positioning and intra-chromosomal allelic shuffling. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Please consider nominating deserving colleagues (including yourselves) who would be excellent candidates for five open positions on the Council, including Nominations for President-elect, Secretary, Treasurer, and 2 Councilors. Please share widely! @official-smbe.bsky.social

New paper out! 📄 My first adventures in (ancient) metagenomics. 🦠 “Exploring DNA degradation in situ and in museum storage through genomics and metagenomics” www.nature.com/articles/s42... Curious about the water color painting (see ALT text)? 🦌 Thread (Bluetorial?) with findings! 🧶👇 (1/n)

Good stuff by @cbo.bsky.social! I have the feeling, though, that many of "our adversaries" are from within academia, in particular, the inertia that keeps things the same way because too many scientists can't imagine other ways and fight against bold initiatives to change the current system.

"One thing is certain: The changes we make ourselves will be healthier than the ones our adversaries demand." New work for @undark.org: undark.org/2025/02/06/o...

Hope you'll forgive a quick thread as I take over as the new EiC of @elife.bsky.social

We are excited to share our work on molar #EvoDevo 🦷 in mouse and hamster 🐁, led by the amazing team of Marie Sémon and Sophie Pantalacci. We find an inverted hourglass pattern, with a maximum of evolutionary divergence at the bell stage. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @lbmcinlyon.bsky.social

1/7 Sexual antagonism arises when males and females face different selection pressures for a trait influenced by shared genes. This is thought to drive balancing selection and maintain genetic polymorphism. We challenge this view in our recent paper : 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrae059

Bluetorial-A dream and a bit of a nightmare Serving as Editor-in-Chief at Science was fascinating. I greatly enjoyed working with talented and committed editorial, news, graphics, and production staff. But the inside look into scientific publishing and AAAS was also deeply disillusioning.

In 2010 (SMBE Lyon) I gave a talk about the impact of GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) on functional sequence evolution. I argued that, because gBGC promotes G and C alleles irrespective of their fitness effect, it should generate some genetic load. 1/5

PRDM9 driven recombination now demonstrated in salmonid fish. By Marie Raynaud and the HotRec consortium. dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

PRDM9 helps determine the location of recombination hotspots in many mammals. Study of salmonid fish reveals that #PRDM9 function is conserved across vertebrates, and this peculiar evolutionary runaway caused by PRDM9 has been active for 100s of millions of years🧪 @plosbiology.org plos.io/3DIvFCG

Insightful thread by @erikvannimwegen.bsky.social, but 20 years ago open access WAS the solution. It was not the final one, of course, and it had its unexpected consequences, but it has transformed science for the better. bioRxiv probably wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the push for OA. 1/3