I've been on the road so I'm behind the times—but if you wanted to destroy US science, I can think of no more expedient action. Blatant unconstitutionality aside, fuck this backwards forwards and sideways. www.science.org/content/article/u-s-congress-considers-sweeping-ban-chinese-collaborations

Play a little game and choose the right icon for each role in science. Play our CRediT Roles icon game/survey, and help make scientific authorship clearer and more accessible! creditsurvey.sciux.org #OpenScience #ScienceUX

Hu & Bentler (1999) with >130k citations selected for huge citation and moderate actual impact--see Nils' rationale that a lot of citation use is unthinking or to stop thinking. What then is the prototype of prototypes for the moderate citation impact and moderate actual impact?

#SciComm community, I can use your help! Please share: 1. Any resources or publications about developing a hands-on tabletop science outreach activity. 2. Any personal tips & tricks based on your experiences running this type of activities! Thanks!

I've never seen a qualitative research paper with excellent figures (relevant, eye-catching, etc.). They only rely on text and photos/screenshots to communicate. #dataviz + #qualitative research seem opposed, no? #scicomm #AcademicWriting

What are some other "actually kind and not evil" software companies you've had a pleasant experience with? I'll start: @blackmagicdesign.bsky.social video editor gives so much for free Eagle.cool is DAM perfect for $30 lifetime @obsidian.md - Happily pay $8 for cloud sync on their free app.

PSA: Last week, Affinity Studio (major Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop alternative) went completely 'free forever'. Pro design software, now accessible to all PhD students. May start recommending this in my workshops. www.affinity.studio/graphic-desi...

I see a huge opportunity for how the AT Protocol could reshape academic publishing. Imagine researchers publishing continuously and atomically — before, during, and after research projects — in public connected continuous streams of discovery and insight.

PI's of BSky: If you had to guess, What percentage of 2nd+ year PhD students in your lab have an @orcid.org?

Last week at #ICSB2025, we shared how #MCP can make LLM-based agents reliable for #SystemsBiology. MCP was barely known there. All the more reason for Cracking Shells to exist: simplifying onboarding for researchers. #AIForScience

@mikemorrison.bsky.social will be sharing how #scientists and #SciComm folks can combine design and psychology principles to create engaging visual science communication tools. Join this Friday, Oct 17 @ 2pm ET for this FREE webinar. Sign up for Zoom link. waterwhys.org/seminar/fall...

We’re proud to launch our SCMS — a platform that turns data, code, and figures into living, connected research ready to share and build on. Read the announcement here → bit.ly/3KGqHK8

Looking forward to speaking at Water Whys on Friday about applying psychology & design to improve science communication!

Could use a few more participants in our study of scientific slide design. Got a sec to go through some example slides then rate them? 🙏 nimble.li/p9lxzlz9 As a bonus, you get to learn some random facts. #scienceUX

It's time to talk visual science communication again! @waterwhysua.bsky.social is back with unique conversations around visual science communication including @mikemorrison.bsky.social Oct. 17. Free talks every other Friday on Zoom start tomorrow. Register now waterwhys.org/seminar/fall... #SciComm

Big believer that posters are better than talks at conferences. After presentating my first #BetterPoster at #ESA2025, that has only been reinforced.

😍 So happy to see this. HHMI is going to create so much positive change in scientific publishing with this. Now that big funders are embracing the preprint, we can focus on upgrading the preprint to be better than the journal article ever was. Born #openacces makes so much possible.

better than average science day? • sperm whale eating a giant squid confirmed • HHMI policy: preprints as most important form of publication

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

Across two studies, we found that short conversations with ChatGPT led climate sceptics to report lower confidence in their sceptical views and small increases in pro-environmental intentions. You can read the article here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

As a species, can we please agree to write all dates like "Sep 10" instead of 10/9 or 9/10? Signed, – An American expat in Hong Kong who is not sure if this Australian yogurt is expired.

What do you think will be the short- and long-term consequences of these new payment limits in #AcademicPublishing? Do you think publishers will just raise their rates to the new cap? 🧪

2, please 2.

This is also why, whenever I eventually manage to get a recipe I like, I hold on to it for dear life (and so I save the actual recipe part in my phone's telephone book - as if it were a person)

Which would you prefer? 1. ChatGPT 2. Google & The entire internet --- but without ads, spammy content, etc. Like recipe sites would just give you the recipe with photos.

This is fascinating but frustrating to hear. I already wrote my paper. I am waiting to see if it is accepted by the journal. The conclusion is extremely abstract and counterintuitive without carefully laying out the reasoning that built it. My first book follows this pattern though. #writersky

Doctors Without Borders goes #betterposter! 🥳 Our #ScienceUX community created an evidence-based poster template to improve science communication at the MSF Pediatric conference this year. Video explains design choices: youtu.be/1QoYDeYu59k

I want this now. Everywhere! It didn't used to be so necessary, when each paper reported ~1 result. But now a single paper can include many results, sometimes of variable robustness. So, we should either return to ~1 result/paper, or cite individual results/figures.

It is really surreal how hard most scientific publishing sites fight to prevent you from downloading even a single graph. Figure embeds with authorship chains can't happen soon enough. youtu.be/A2JpI-5NIsc?...

💯 This is exactly what I've been trying to say in like 100 workshops and videos on research posters. State a conclusion, then defend it. Versus working up to it over 500 words that people won't spend the time to read.

Announcing a key addition to our team: @buildwithjill.bsky.social, our Product Lead. With Jillian’s leadership, we’re evolving Curvenote into a platform where scientific work—figures, code, data, text—can be easily created, connected, reused, and shared. Read more: curvenote.com/blog/jillian...

Thrilled to be on this amazing team and be part of the mission to help science move beyond the PDF! 🚀

This new video by @mikemorrison.bsky.social is relevant to my interests…. In conference posters! youtu.be/ErTfb2plrrU

Underrated science tools startup trap: If your users are trained to expect bad UX, good UX feels disorienting. But if you copy existing patterns, you can't differentiate. Designing science tools is a bigger puzzle than most founders think. Curious how other science/tech folks navigate this.

If we want to improve scientific poster sessions, we have to get good at measuring them. So I went to Europe's largest liver science conference and attempted to measure how scientists browse posters. Findings soon. Watch the walkthrough: youtu.be/ErTfb2plrrU #ScienceUX #betterposter #EASL2025

Love to see this @elife.bsky.social article using short titles for the thumbnail card and also a takeaway-title for the full article. This helps you skim & decide on thumbnails faster, and learn from the article itself sooner (if people only read the title, make the title a lesson). #scienceUX

The biggest publishers pulled profit margins in 2023 that rival Big Tech. And they still charge you to publish and your library to read. When are we going to start seriously thinking of alternatives to reform #PeerReview? 🧪 #SciPub #AcademicPublishing

#oss #floss #Adobe subscription is expensive Alternatives: Inkscape, GIMP, Audacity. Please quote and share what you use. Use #oss to keep it going. #graphicdesign #gameDev #digitalArt #pixelArt #photography

Delighted to be sharing some work we have been working on for sometime: Cetuximab Vs Pantitumumab - we found no efficacy difference but did find different side effect profile. Presenting at #ESMOGI25 this week doi.org/10.6084/m9.f... I'll be near the poster Friday PM if anyone wants to talk

For anybody considering it, it's been 4 months since I broke up with Adobe after nearly 30 years designing with Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects for animations. It's...fine? Figma & Davinci Resolve handle 95% of what I need with better #UX, and I save $100s/year.

True #scicomm joke: A friend of mine is a professional science illustrator, and was helping a scientist design a poster. The poster had 65 graphs on it. 📊 She asked the scientist "Which graph is the most important?" The scientist replied "All of them." Which, technically, is true?

Relatedly, even though it’s free for you to post a preprint, does anybody know the operating cost-per-preprint that a place like @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is covering for us?

New kiki/bouba test just dropped

It's not just academia that will be affected by the disruptions to research funding https://go.nature.com/4khYPIA

Hi, in case your phone didn't pick up the QR code to the slides of my Hitch-Hikers Guide to Computational Metabolomics talk this morning at #Metabolomics2025, featuring #xcms, #massbank, not #metfrag but #CASMI and #MetFamily, please find them at doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Next week! On 3 July, Rainbow Trap is launching in Edinburgh (and online) @lighthousebks.bsky.social 🌈 Excited to explore how categories and classifications shape the possibilities of LGBTQ lives! 🎟️ Some tickets still available: lighthousebookshop.com/events/rainb... #LGBTQ #books #booklaunch

Got to work with 120 Early Career Researchers on poster + presentation design at NSF EPSCoR. Nearly exploded Google Docs with 120 simultaneous people playing presentation slide & poster design games. After 5 years, still my favorite group! #ScienceUX #betterposter

“We found that scientists are increasingly using writing components that reduce cognitive load and improve reader understanding” Happy finding from an analysis of 70 years of medical publications! #sciPub #scienceUX

Has our scientific writing gotten better or worse since the 1950s? Some cool data here. #acwri #scipub link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In May we hosted a convergence in Banff, Canada. The group gathered to ask better questions of science communication. Not just what’s broken?—but what could be? We surfaced stories, tools, and a hunger for something more open, more connected. articles.continuousfoundation.org/articles/ban...