We are excited to share our new preprint: iCLIP3 — an improved protocol for transcriptome-wide mapping of protein–RNA interactions at single-nucleotide resolution.
04.03.2026 20:23
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We are excited to share our new preprint: iCLIP3 — an improved protocol for transcriptome-wide mapping of protein–RNA interactions at single-nucleotide resolution.
Ask your AI assistant how it feels about this!
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
A painting of a bird beside the text "honestly, i've already heard dumber fuckin' ideas this week"
Contrary to what the photography might suggest, the first #RNAConfluence was a great event!
This is a really nice poster and a cool project!
An intracellular meteor shower. EB3 comets tracking growing microtubule plus-ends in a cultured cell.
Professors: we must start teaching the creative scientific process to PhD students and postdocs! Register for our April 24 train-the-trainer event in New York to learn from us how to teach it.
night-science.org/train-the-tr...
Register by Jan. 30th for a free Night Science Podcast T-shirt!
We've got ISSUES. Literally.
We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?
arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563
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Attend the 2. RMU-RNA Salon X-mas Meeting to find out your new favourite RNA modification!
December 18, 2025, Niederrad Campus, Frankfurt
bit.ly/2_Xmas_RMU_R...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
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Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A small book, big truths.
@svobodalab.bsky.social This one is for you!
“Just because you are offended doesn’t mean you are right.”
Ricky Gervais
Our new preprint, full of exciting data, is now available. Have a look!
QKI ensures splicing fidelity during cardiogenesis by engaging the U6 tri-snRNP to activate splicing at weak 5ʹ splice sites
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Což, pokud si dobře pamatuju, bylo jeho jediné („)štěstí(“), protože opylování hrachu představeným nevadilo tak, jako obcování myší mezi zdmi kláštera.
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
Tour de force spearheaded by brilliant Marko Jovanovic and colleagues!
An Optimized SP3 Sample Processing Workflow for In-Depth and Reproducible Phosphoproteomics pubs.acs.org/doi/10....
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#proteomics #prot-paper
Researchers are making ever more sophisticated mini organs in the lab — and now they can grow their own blood vessels
go.nature.com/4nNF3ri
My point is that Illustrator is not meant for assembling multi-page figures full of different types of files and text, yet people use it for that purpose, just because it’s somehow possible.
Creating charts, models, labelled WB images… and assembling them into figures are two different problems. 🤔
One day, scientists will discover Adobe InDesign/Affinity Publisher/… for figure assembly and our lives will be much easier…
A review of the history of protein-RNA friendship.
Germany of the 21st century: A place where there is a massive problem for all major personal parcel delivery companies to deliver an order.
#OrdnungMussSein
Feedback without specifics is not feedback. It’s frustration.
'Night science' is what you do when you're not sure what's the question.
A painting of a bird next to the words "I'm gonna need a moment to process this bullshit"
Dream big. Dare to fail. Fuck dull, incremental science.
We have several open postdoc positions! We do computational biology 🧬🖥️ and deep learning to understand the genomics of genome instability and (somatic) genome evolution in ageing and cancer. Interested? 👉🏻 more details: tu-dresden.de/cmcb/biotec/...
