In my teenage bedroom at dawn listening to Patti Smith cause @jennpelly.bsky.social pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

This Historian of Life Sciences three-year position at Cold Spring Harbord Lab, NY is worth a look. #HistSci www.schooljobs.com/careers/cshl...

This reminds me of one of my favorite @kawulf.bsky.social posts on the subjectivity of historical narratives scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/12/21/w...

A solemn and stormy Edmund Fitzgerald day to all who celebrate: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP0k...

James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

Baby Tardigrades! scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/11/07/b...

Good journals (and good editors), and there are plenty that I love, do much more than peer review

As an aside: journals do a lot more than just send manuscripts for review. A good editor will spend far more time on quality control and contextualisation, than on inviting a few peer reviewers. It's one of those overlooked and underappreciated parts of the job that keep the slop at bay.

Great post this week from @lisalibrarian.bsky.social that hopes to clear up some of the confusions around Creative Commons licenses and the use of such content for AI training. This speaks to the ongoing failure of the publishing and OA communities to make clear just what these licenses mean

The new issue of @genomeresearch is now live. Follow the link to new research on wheat centromere adaptation, Quadrupia - a G-quadruplex database, and more! tinyurl.com/Genome-Res-3...

A new issue of CSH Protocols is out! @cshlpress.bsky.social The cover image highlights the work by Kang et al., who describe a rapid and robust Agrobacterium-mediated #Maize transformation protocol that uses immature embryos as explants. ⬇️Links below

Wow! OUP acquired Karger. Great pickup, market consolidation continues corp.oup.com/news/oxford-...

THIS. In all the discussions about Publish-Review-Curate, alt peer review models, etc., too often the other things (good) journals (should) do are often omitted. Information verification and many other checks are as, if not more important, journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

CSHL welcomes David Crotty (@dacrotty.bsky.social), new executive director of @cshlpress.bsky.social! Crotty, a 20+ year veteran of scientific publishing, succeeds founder John Inglis (@johninglis.bsky.social), who has led the Press since 1987. Read more at the link: www.cshl.edu/cshl-press-n...

Some exciting news – as of December 1, I will be taking the reins as the Executive Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. www.cshl.edu/cshl-press-n...

I’ve spent many years explaining/defending biorxiv’s “no reviews” policy. The logic was always that opening Word and opining is a far lower barrier than doing actual research, so noise’d be >> signal and we didn’t want to make subjective quality judgements. LLMs mean it makes even more sense 1/2

"The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues."

As the editor of CSH Protocols, I wholeheartedly agree. And if you have an idea for a topic to do a protocols collection on, or know of a field that would benefit from such a collection, let's talk!

Happy Halloween from the haunted junkyard @thehardtimesnews.bsky.social

3. Utter Horror!

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I am Ready for Your Apology www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-...

Time to get ‘em out of storage i.pinimg.com/originals/0f...

Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I'm quoted here: www.science.org/content/arti... “But at least in what I’ve seen, there has been a widespread de-emphasis by journals on worrying about the formatting of manuscripts, at least until it becomes likely that the paper is going to be accepted by the journal.”

"However, the lack of transparency troubles me, as does the fact that the enforcers are not themselves accountable to anyone" Exactly, they need to do better. Or we need a different system. newsletter.journalology.com/p/cureus-los...

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Question for the hive mind — a graduate student is asking for the best book on how to write a scientific paper. What would you suggest?

Hard agree w/prediction. Wd also point out that publishing replications studies, as defined here, but also those that escape this definition, is a solved problem (it's only not solved if you want it in glam journal but that is a diff't category of problem) #OverlyHonestEditor #ScientificPublishing

oh my GODDDDDDDDDDD (apologies for screenshotting the hellsite, which I no longer use; I saw the link in CNN's Reliable Sources newsletter)

If progress depends on scholars being actively interested in the infrastructures of publishing, we need some really big thinking on what might motivate that interest, bc it doesn't seem that scholars find these infrastructures inherently interesting.

Again, your mostly non-profit mostly uni press humanities publishers are not the thing making a wreckage of scholarly publishing. Paying for their work is a good thing, and we should keep doing that.

"So here we are, with higher ed drifting toward insolvency, its leaders stuck in a corporate mindset that can’t pivot back to the actual mission: teaching, research, and public good." Yup

This passage in @nealstephenson.bsky.social's "The Diamond Age" from 1995 caught my eye. Perhaps we should be talking about pseudo-intelligence (PI) instead of AI.

In honor of International OA Week, The Scholarly Kit... https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/10/21/ask-the-chefs-who-owns-our-knowledge/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=Society%20for%20Scholarly%20Publishing&utm_content=Ask%20the%20Chefs%3A%20Who%20Owns%20Our%20Knowledge%3F

Once again, EVERY R1 research university depends on federal funding for ~15-25% of its budget. You simply can't unplug the largest or 2nd-largest source of $$ of every R1 university & expect it not to have devastating consequences for graduate education, which will spill over to undergrad education.

I still contend that >90% of the benefit of writing a review isn't the audience. It's for the author going through the literature, finding gaps in knowledge, learning how experiments are done, etc. It really isn't about writing a review. It's about doing the review yourself. AI can't do that for you

I talked about why the replication/reproducibility crisis is, and has always been, rhetoric, rather than fact. Masking scientific progress in general in favor of a simplified crisis narrative has caused a lot of epistemic, ethical, and practical harms so far. We can and we must stop feeding it.

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

Discuss > "Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

A common challenge for open knowledge organisations, as summarised by Birgit Mǔller from the Wikimedia Foundation: 'Our knowledge is free, our infrastructure is not' #KnowledgeIsHuman

go, student newspaper of Notre Dame and Saint Mary "employ in-class essays, oral exams+ rigorous discussions — that are far more difficult to use AI tools to complete. a close reading of the text should constitute the bulk in any introductory humanities class." www.ndsmcobserver.com/article/2025...

I've received an 'exclusive' invite to try Nature's new 'research assistant', which will burn down a forest to provide a 'summary of the paper' I'm reading and I have SUCH exciting news for them, that's called an 'abstract' and the actual authors already wrote it for me, no forest-burning required.

Speculation: There has been a recency bias in citations for a long time, because the newer work should contain more up-to-date knowledge. This could reverse. People might increasingly refer to work before the 2020s, because it wouldn't have been corrupted by gen AI.

“Students continue to believe that brainstorming with AI helps them get to good arguments, but I have not seen any proof of that.” Industry reps tell students (accurately) that they won’t get jobs if they don’t use AI, and no amount of critical thinking instruction will change that. It’s maddening.

All of this underscores a fundamental divide in publishing reformers between those who think peer review should result in some binary yes/no accept/reject judgment of validity and those who think such a judgment is antithetical to the whole idea and peer reviewed just mean "there are reviews".

Just to be super clear, if you’re phoning in your peer review to ai you should quit your job so someone else who actually likes science can have it.

Genetics database hit by Trump cuts bailed out by Wellcome. Stopgap funds support UK-based researchers, but future of FlyBase in jeopardy after terminated NIH grant. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

to quote ex-chancellor of the UC system Clark Kerr: "The university is a series of individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance about parking"