"In 2022 the article total was ∼47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth—if any—in the number of practicing scientists" "Specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year" with consequences on "citation behaviors" inter alia.

The "Szilard Point." When we talk about The strain and the drain on scientific publishing, it's this. Researchers working just to stay afloat, and not on what we actually want them to do: research, discover, innovate. Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

I wish 2026 is the year we stop the drain that scientific publishers impose on science. Instead of funding science, increasing shares of shrinking research budgets are funneled to publishers in exchange of.. not much. Understand the strain: tinyurl.com/2b6wxx5r Stop the drain: tinyurl.com/3jfscscy

I'm really excited to break up the holiday relaxation time with a new preprint that benchmarks AlphaFold3 (AF3)/“co-folding” methods with 2 new stringent performance tests. Thread below - but first some links: A longer take: fraserlab.com/2025/12/29/k... Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A postdoc in my lab, Ben Flanagan, just had a really nice paper come out in MB&E @official-smbe.bsky.social comparing transcriptomic response to a standardized immune challenge in 14 phylogenetically diverse species of ray-finned fishes academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

This is the "SEA SHEEP" (Costasiella kuroshimae) & it took the old axiom: "you are what you eat" VERY literally. It eats algae & rather than just digest them, it harvests the chloroplasts & becomes PHOTOSYNTHETIC. Solar slug! Also, some of its cousins can rip their own heads off.

100% this. Funders AND research institutes shouldn't mandate where to publish. But their policies can & SHOULD discourage wasteful use of money on publishing in journals with meaningless peer review. This can be implemented many ways: bans, limits to APC spend in journals of X, Y, or Z type, etc...

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/🧵

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

A reminder that what @hansonmark.bsky.social wrote a month back is vital to understanding the path forward.

Today the Swiss announced they don't have an agreement with Springer Nature -- swissuniversity tried to secure a deal and failed in the face of the extreme rise in publishing fees. When the game is rigged, it's better to stop playing. 🧵 to understand the drain of scientific publishing👇

This kinda stuff makes me proud to work with the incredible #Drosophila community A correction made by the main lab 5 years later solely because "we couldn't replicate a couple results, so we wanted to modify the original article to reflect that uncertainty." Class act 🏆 #ResearchIntegrity #SciPub

STOP WITH WHATEVER IT IS YOURE DOING AND READ THIS NOW!

!!!

In case you missed it, here is a related thread on the recent Drain on scientific publishing paper explaining why things need to change: bsky.app/profile/hans...

You'd have to be a “scientific publisher.” You'd make better profits than Apple and could benefit twice from public funds, from research and from libraries, which would then have to buy back the results in book form. Simply awesome.

"Rather than democratizing scientific publishing, Open Access has helped commercial publishers generate more profits".

suspect a big reason why many academics and others who work in areas where getting facts RIGHT is key are disinterested in using LLMs for research: they’ve tried it, they keep noticing major errors in output, and they conclude that having to verify all that doesn’t actually save them time.

As someone who ended up using non-model systems after doing his PhD with Drosophila, you don't realise just how amazing FlyBase or WormBase are until you try to genetics without them.

True...

The "Szilard Point." When we talk about The strain and the drain on scientific publishing, it's this. Researchers are working more just to stay afloat, and less on what we actually want them to do: research, discover, innovate. Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

"These costs are incurred by scientists in writing proposals, by their peers in reviewing them and by the administrative systems that run the process. The question is, which costs more: the research being funded, or the application process itself?" #AcademicSky 🧪

The "Szilard Point." When we talk about The strain and the drain on scientific publishing, it's this. Researchers are working more just to stay afloat, and less on what we actually want them to do: research, discover, innovate. Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

Hey #EcoEvo and #SymbioSky, what are your go-to reads for White Nose syndrome and Chytridiomycosis? Talking seminal papers in the field, but also recent major highlights. Thanks for any recommendations!

Hey #EcoEvo and #SymbioSky, what are your go-to reads for White Nose syndrome and Chytridiomycosis? Talking seminal papers in the field, but also recent major highlights. Thanks for any recommendations!

"We're ignoring good ideas in favour of AI slop, big data for the sake of big data, and research with pre-expected applications." There, I fixed it for you. Read Chaos in yhe brickyard (1963): www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #FundFundamentalScience #AcademicSky #Science

Pressed on this, Gemini also recanted. It's not a standard English expression, it admitted, but it is a useful metaphor. So now I've got one LLM gaslighting me rather than snitching on another LLM for making shit up. And that's the point of this thread:

we can kill them all if we just work together and ✨believe💫

You can do this right now: Think of a person who wrote a paper you love, whose work influenced or helped you, or has made your professional life better. Search up their email address. Shoot them a quick email of thanks. It means so, so much. This is a rough time of year, share some joy.

Catastrophic flooding in BC and WA is putting thousands at risk. We’ve always had heavy rain and floods; but as the world warms, they’re becoming more frequent and severe. And it was a UVic research team that ID'd the human fingerprint in increasing extreme precip. www.nature.com/articles/nat...

On the 7th day before break, the OA community gave to us: Landmark research into the state of academic publishing. @hansonmark.bsky.social & team produced two papers: 'The Strain/Drain on Scientific Publishing' demonstrating the challenges we face doi.org/10.1162/qss_... doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Aaand... my first cover!! RpS6 phosphorylation (magenta) in a Udd (ribosome biogenesis factor) mutant ovary 🔬

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Impact of demographic change in one image.

Here's another one: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... So basically, it seems @springernature.com requires clinical trials in Scientific Reports to adhere to rigorous standards, but you can still publish an uncontrolled study of a drug, with no registration, control, blinding or whatever.

Super cool story - viruses keep translation up by preventing mRNA circularisation! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The recent take that academics will be lost w/o Google Scholar feels very silly. There are umpteen other indexing resources (eg ORCID, ResearchGate). Are they as good as Google Scholar? No. But I'm sure we'll find something we're happy with. This post brought to you by @bsky.app (🦋 est. 2019).

Recently had the chance to hear @carlbergstrom.com on information foraging in the current space of LLMs. He and @jevinwest.bsky.social have crafted a course that touches various facets of LLMs. Just finished reading through its 18 modules. Absolutely loved it! thebullshitmachines.com

"Why do we put hurdles in the way of the people that are actually going to drive our economy? It makes zero sense." Prof Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel prize winning scientist, says the UK's scientific future is being put at risk www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Horrible idea. AI will regress all grants towards the mean since AI is trained to produce the average output. Grants require expertise that ignores bad literature and rejects author assertions if false. no AI review I've seen has ever challenged the author's assertions as fundamentally flawed.

Great thread on the Ponzi scheme that is academic publishing. Public funds funnelled into obscene private profits using free labour of (publicly funded) Academics. AI slop contaminating the literature.

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

New preprint to round off 2025, wrapping up work I did @zslscience.bsky.social and continued @uniexecec.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We studied skin bacterial community diversity in Palmate Newts from the Isle of Rum. Pic: dramatic AI newt emerging from (hovering on?) a pond

Funding organisations can fix the science publishing system – which currently puts profit first and science second – according to new research. @uniexecec.bsky.social

1. The Strain on Scientific Publishing (Hanson et al) @hansonmark.bsky.social and his colleagues analysed the volume of publications vs volume of researchers, the publish or perish paradigm, Open Access processing charges as a business model, the inability to read all new publications etc. 3/14

THREAD One Year of tracking research communication on @bsky.app This time last year we officially added the Bluesky social platform to the places where we track research communication and article sharing. Here are some of the most viral articles that gained traction in the last 12 months. 1/14

Now published as version of record at @elife.bsky.social ! Layers of Immunity: Deconstructing the Drosophila effector response. The tools are now deposited in the VDRC (link ⬇️) elifesciences.org/articles/107... shop.vbc.ac.at/vdrc_store/d... #Drosophila #IDsky #SymbioSky #Infection #Immunology