Journal Editors

A study shows that more than half of peer reviewers (53%) now use AI. The reviewers claim using AI mostly to draft reports (59%), summarize findings (29%), or flag potential misconduct (28%). www.frontiersin.org/news/2025/12...

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

"A New Year’s resolution for researchers: Before asking “Is this publishable?”, ask “Is this worth its environmental cost? Quality over quantity is no longer optional. It is an ecological imperative." lnkd.in/eqdZXVjf

A new issue of CSH Protocols is out! @cshlpress.bsky.social The cover image highlights the work by Peng and Rader, who describe the use of a pComb3 family phagemid derivative, pC3C, for the generation of chimeric rabbit/human Fab libraries for phage display. ⬇️Links below

From "How Nature Became a 'Prestige' Journal" substack.com/home/post/p-...

Oh boy... (re: AI review) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Medicine journals are less international than journals in other disciplines and do not increase their levels of internationalization, whereas physics journals appear to be segregating between those that are international and those that are not" doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Interesting. "I confess to a belief (...) that the opacity of IF decision making is a blessing in disguise. It’s impossible to fully ‘game’ metrics you don’t know, and can only guess at… Sometimes, a separation of powers, and minimizing transparency, is the best way to keep everyone on their toes"

"Here we present the adaptamer (ADAR modulatable aptamer), a compact (<120 bp) RNA switch that couples an FDA-approved small-molecule–responsive aptamer with endogenous ADAR–mediated RNA editing to regulate expression" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Day of sending reminders.

I wonder what people prefer... For people to use AI to help with their writing, to level the field regarding language, or For everyone to write in their own language, and then we use AI for translation

Oncotarget published like 30 retractions on Dec 31 www.oncotarget.com/archive/v16/

And if you can't make it, we at CSH Protocols have put together a collection of reviews and protocols for work on Xenopus! Guest edited by Hazel L. Sive. Link below.

Great. Because pricing based on articles published is always a terrible idea. Guess what other system was like that, that didn't care about articles published... www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-publ...

As you'd expect, "IN MICE". If you get me as the editor, I'll add it to the title.

This, of course, is absolute nonsense. But some continue to hold that pernicious view about professional editors.

Well, yes. #Incentives Genome Research is similar.

The reviewers are us.

"Gene regulatory networks? These are correlations, at best"

Amen. "Potential degradation of the literature by technology reinforces the value of a record maintained with human scientific experience and expertise" Editorial by @holdenthorp.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Instead, I think it is more pressing that *institutions* get involved and check what is being submitted with their names... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Yup

Instead, I think it is more pressing that *institutions* get involved and check what is being submitted with their names... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thanks for the conversations!

🤷‍♂️

Most of the genome is junk. And it's fine and perfectly compatible with everything. www.newscientist.com/article/2508...

It's strange how rarely journalists covering this space can ask "Hey, but is it bullshit?". CEO's whose companies are over-leveraged, bubbly, and unprofitable promise a major breakthrough that will justify their fragile position and no one seems to *consider* they may be lying. It's Theranos 2.0.

When nobody checks the references...

On replying to emails from lab applicants: "I make a point of replying to every single personalized email (except the clearly generic ones sent en mass). (...) Academia is already tough and uncertain enough - we don't need to add silence to the list of challenges" www.linkedin.com/posts/fernan...

50-page+ papers, with dozens of figures (each with multiple panels) and extensive supplementary info (more figures and tables)... is this the best way?

It really is hard to come up with a system worst than APC-based OA... What an atrocious thing.

"We also find that approximately half of researchers never publish in a venue with an impact factor above 15, which, under journal-level evaluation regimes, may exclude them from consideration for opportunities. Many of these researchers publish equally influential work"

Thoughts?

‪It has a name now 😜 Many thanks to Ken for agreeing to put his good name to my...artwork. The image is in the public domain (CC 0), but citations to the linked documents are warmly welcomed. ✅ zenodo.org/records/1808... ✅ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24452418/

The conservative bias of life scientists: not everything needs to be about humans, and not everything needs to be conserved to be interesting/ important www.cell.com/current-biol...

Same

This is interesting, but I'm surprised people still use the terms "lower" and "higher" organisms www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"It’s almost impossible to know whether a peer-review report has been generated by artificial intelligence, according to a study that put AI-detecting tools to the test" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"As AI systems advance, they will challenge our fundamental assumptions about research quality, scholarly communication,& the nature of intellectual labor. Science policy-makers must consider how to evolve our scientific institutions to accommodate the rapidly changing scientific production process"

"Results from experiments with N = 4 or less are shown to be highly misleading (...). For a cut-off of 2-fold expression differences, we find an N of 6-7 mice is required to consistently decrease the false positive rate to below 50%, and the detection sensitivity to above 50%"

But, just like old Bond movies, many wish we could still do it like that 😉

Make a Bond movie academic Dr No: typical outcomes when submitting to CNS

Yup, despite policies, many won't disclose AI use because they feel it might somehow count against them. Also, policies without consequences are typically ignored. www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.06705

Nature’s survey of PhD candidates reveals hard-won wisdom on choosing supervisors, managing mental health and surviving academic culture. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"A mathematical model is a logical machine for converting assumptions into conclusions. If the model is correct and we believe its assumptions then we must, as a matter of logic, believe its conclusions. " link.springer.com/article/10.1...

It's possibly higher. www.nature.com/articles/d41...