Context: www.nature.com/articles/d41... But also a reminder that you need to plan your own notes and data archiving and backups regardless of whether you use LLM tools or not. If you think paper-hungry pet will save you from a retraction, think again #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificPublishing

Join the quest - especially historians of London science! 👇So far we have narrowed this down to some lab branded as "Mill Hill" in London E1 postcode in the 1960s (i.e. not actually in Mill Hill)

This year, the taxonomists on the Fungarium Sequencing Project had a goal to review 10,000 specimens. They hit their target an impressive three months ahead of schedule, so to celebrate their hard work, here are some of the stories they’ve uncovered!

Jesus saves, but professionals back up and real academics don't do their work in an ai prompt window

lmao get wrecked imo www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Still time to apply: New Generation Thinkers 2026 AHRC is partnering with BBC Radio 4 to offer five early-career researchers the opportunity to work with programme makers, appear on air, and gain first-hand experience of how ideas make it to broadcast. Apply by 28 Jan 2026

#REDSConference2026 Kay Guccione's closing remarks: Watch out for the call for new REDS Conference Advisory Group members to help shape next year's conference. Many presentations will be turned into blog articles with help from the team. Follow the REDS LinkedIn page www.linkedin.com/company/rese...

#REDSConference2026: Next year's REDS is on 20th and 21st January 2027. This has been excellent, I highly recommend people register for next year. And it's free!

The #REDSConference2026 closing keynote is from Dr Lisa Bradley (Uni of Glasgow) on "Creativity in Practice: Making Communities, Cultures, and Futures in Higher Education". She asks "What becomes possible when creativity is viewed as a crucial strategic practice?"

Given all the news about ICE in the past few weeks, can I kindly remind you all that RELX (owners of Elsevier & LexisNexis) is "mission-critical" to ICE. ICE pays RELX Group and Thomson Reuters millions of dollars for the personal data it needs to fuel its big data policing program […]

🗺️What a multi-lingual collection: Jacques Gay was a botanist and collector from Switzerland and our Archives hold over 35 volumes of his manuscripts. He wrote mainly in French, although Latin and even Greek found its way into his writing as well. Any polyglots able to translate? #KewLA

This is a fantastic conference for anyone involved in research and/or its communication #R2RConf

#REDSConference2026 Jane Shepard of UAL presents a fascinating WIP looking at research environments by analogy with Jane Jacobs' 1961 work on human-centred urban design. The ideas of small blocks, mixed use neighbourhoods and eyes on the street can also be applied to research environments.

Now at #REDSConference2026 I'm in the 'Works in Progress' stream, with 5-minute talks about ongoing projects. First up is a U Glasgow project on developing teaching opportunities for postdoctoral researchers as part of a curriculum of applied and experiential learning exploring societal challenges

#REDSConference2026 Day 2: paper by @whiteroseuc.bsky.social of unis in N England on the development needs of established researchers: achieved independence, recognition, leadership, in ‘squeezed middle’ between early-career researchers and those in senior institutional leadership roles

#REDSConference2026 Day 2: First paper of the day was from Kay Guccione, Glasgow, Tasha Kitano, QUT and Sian Vaughan, BCU (Birmingham) on reading groups for professionals doing supervisor development. There are two groups in diff time zones, and Kay and Tasha have done autoethnography to review them

Now at #REDSConference2026 we have a publisher panel givin tips on getting research published. Gina Walker says if a paper is rejected, start working on something else for a bit, but don't give up on the rejected one, keep trying other places to get it out. Rejections are normal and common!

#REDSConference2026 My next paper was "Evaluating what hasn’t happened yet? A creative methodological response to the challenge of evaluating a 2-year cross-institutional culture change project" (Anne Ploin and Ros Attenborough, InFrame Project, Scotland).

#REDSConference2026 Peter O'Rourke and Becky Rowe from Uni Exeter presented on refreshing an online hub for ECRs. Coproduction with ECRs, community and consistency are crucial. Needed to balance quick wins with long-term sustainability. This was a 4-month project by Becky in the RD team

#REDSConference2026 has lots of papers on projects in researcher development from all sorts of institutions. The first I saw was from @dkfz.bsky.social, who helped researchers run year-long projects for 10 years, to help them learn project management skills. See www.frontiersin.org/journals/edu...

The first plenary of #REDSConference2025 was by Jennifer Smith-Maguire of Sheffield Hallam Uni on "The Radical Power of Fun: Playfulness as a Catalyst for Research Culture Development". She made a strong case for the importance of fun as a serious way of temporarily inverting the social order

I'm attending the #REDSConference2026 today and tomorrow, learning how to get creative in researcher development. I may post a bit on this hashtag.

Are you planning to undertake a project in 2026 which involves collecting plant-related data? Would you like <£1,000 towards your costs? Apply for a #BSBIPlantStudyGrant! Here's how: bsbi.org/learn/grants... Read how a #BSBIGrant helped Katherine research ancient meadows: bsbi.org/blog/2026/01...

This is how we first teach chirality to our undergrads !

Have you met the Wikipede? In another universe, maybe it has been Wikipedia's logo for over two decades. Community members submitted many designs, proposed changes, and debated them openly 🧵⬇️ (1/5)

I wish they gave these to you every time you increased academic rank. I particularly tend to forget (took a long time to recognise) the second point. I got this at the council of Europe parliamentary meeting two weeks ago Monday.

Great article 'How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian' by Hana Lee Goldin. "Use AI to explore. Use libraries to verify. Use your brain to evaluate." cardcatalogforlife.substack.com

May this holiday season be filled with unexpected cameos of replicability and data sleuth work everywhere you look. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SskQ...

Wow this is a seriously serious supplementary figure from @cellpress.bsky.social today. Panels A through UU. I get that Cell likes to minimize the number of supplementary figures. But is this really what is happening here? www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Yearly reminder that the world will not end if that new manuscript or revision sits on your desk for a couple more weeks, or you are realistic about decision times. Editors & reviewers are people too, are getting swamped with work just about now, and will likely enjoy a well-deserved break soon 🧪

If you're teaching a graduate level course, I beg you to include a module on how to schedule and run a meeting. Time zones, calendar invites, links, agendas, minutes, chairing. Together we can be the change we so desperately need.

Why does professional always mean conforming to confident masculine culture? Screw that. “Professional” is getting your job done. What’s not professional is thinking someone isn’t good at their job because they use emojis! 😤 Communication evolves, and the trajectory is to the less formal.

So...my undergrad thesis student is doing a quality analysis of studies found in meta-analyses. She identified a few and we contacted the authors to request their effect sizes and other variables for the studies in their papers. Here's what happened: scientiapsychiatrica.com/index.php/Sc...

An exciting opportunity to join the team behind one of the world's major zoological libraries 📚 We are currently recruiting for two roles, an Archivist and a Reading Room Assistant, to join ZSL's Library and Archives team. Find out more & apply before 19th December: careers.zsl.org/vacancies/va...

Museum folks! I'm running a small, anonymous & unscientific survey about how much museums and other heritage organisations pay writers. If you have a moment, please respond, and share if you can. Thank you! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Fungi are among the most important and beautiful soil organisms. 🍄 Explore the fungal tree of life, with an emphasis on the macroscopic diversity of fungi. 📷 Laszlo G. Nagy

I've been saying this for years

#WorldSoilDay Healthy soil = Healthy food = Healthy humans = Healthy planet 70% of our soil is already degraded. Let’s act before it’s too late. #SaveSoil SaveSoil.org

2/2 🧵 The 2025 #WorldSoilDay theme, Healthy Soils for Healthy Cities, reminds us that #soils provide us with key #EcosystemServices also in #UrbanAreas: 🔹 Provide the foundation for #UrbanForests🌳 🔹 Absorb #water 🌧️ 🔹 Foster #ClimateChange 🌡️ & more! 📽 Learn more in this video from @fao.org 👇

#AdriftLab recently completed another #WritingRetreat. The success of this approach - bringing our team together and blocking out dedicated time for deep thinking & writing - has been such a game changer. Gone are distractions like email, and in their place, creativity & productivity abounds

This article suggests the possibility of training AI on pre-existing proposals and their review reports, scores and related decisions. I.e. training them on a system which is known to preferentially award larger amounts of money to white men. What could possibly go wrong?

Help us gauge the state of the UK's research & innovation sector in terms of preventing and handling bullying & harassment. Please share our survey of anyone who has witnessed or experienced it at work. go.hw.ac.uk/EDICa/Bullyi...

This manuscript is the culmination of years of discussions and work on how projects that aspire to do participatory research with autistic people can truly be inclusive and neurodiversity-affirming, reflecting our experiences on two initiatives. Nothing About Us Without Us!

Nominations for the UKRN Dorothy Bishop Prize 2026 have opened! Named after @deevybee.bsky.social, the prize, first awarded in 2022, celebrates the contributions of early career researchers to research improvement. Nominations close 18 January 2026. #AcademicSky #Research

all academic applications should have consolation prizes. doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020” or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”

If you run across a gen A.I. slop 🤖💩 diagram in an academic journal, I’d love to know about it! Please fill out this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Slop in journals is illuminating about journals’ quality control. And journals would like you to forget their mistakes. #AcademicChatter

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

🚨BREAKING: Kenyan court rules “sharing seeds is NOT a crime” The High Court ruled in favour of smallholder farmers and their right to save, share and exchange their own seeds. 🌱 This is a landmark verdict for food sovereignty over corporate greed. Learn more from @greenpeaceafrica.org ⬇️

I heard a story about a female academic giving a paper at the IHR who, after receiving a long and aggressive question from a senior male professor, simply leaned back with her hands behind her head and replied “Oh, do fuck off.”

Just last week at work I was messaging about Aluminum (Al) and someone thought I was talking about artificial intelligence (AI). Needless to say several very confused messages occurred before we understood one another