If you have any examples of generative A.I. in academic journals, let me know by filling out this form:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
You can see the academic shop collection: doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...
Sainsbury Laboratory Symposium 2026 logo - Shaping Life-Mechanisms of Morphogenesis. Timelapse of a developing Arabidopsis leaf imaged at 9-12 days old under a confocal microscope, with cells segmented and coloured using MorphographX software. Images by Sarah Attrill.
Registrations now open for #SLS26 Sainsbury Laboratory Symposium 2026 in Cambridge, UK — Shaping Life: Mechanisms of Morphogenesis!
Join us explore how cellular, genetic & mechanical forces sculpt plant form
📅 22–24 Sept 2026
In-person + livestream
Limited fee waivers
www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/sls
#plantsi
Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!
"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."
The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria, invites applicants for the position of Rector. This is an exceptional opportunity to lead a renowned institution dedicated to the humanities and social sciences.
www.iwm.at/news/the-iwm...
40 is the new 30 🙌
Wow 🤩
Check out the new version of my climate science textbook. Free, accessible and online. Let me know what you think. open.oregonstate.education/climatescien...
‘Science journals retract 500 papers a month. This is why it matters.
A small team of volunteers is tracking thousands of falsified studies, including cases of bribery, fraud and plagiarism’
Ivan Oransky @retractionwatch.com, @alicedreger.bsky.social @thetimes.com
www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...
screenshot of my post
Big new blogpost!
My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.
--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...
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:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Venn diagram of major strategies used to cope with heat stress with examples of species expected to specialize in heat tolerance/acclimation (yellow circles), heat avoidance through drought-deciduousness (green circles), and heat avoidance through homeothermic leaf cooling (blue circles).
High #temperature acclimation of #photosystem II in land plants
#TansleyReview by @bposch.bsky.social et al.
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@hultinelab.bsky.social #PlantScience #photosynthesis
I agree 😅 no frogs in the lab yet…
One of today's winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is UC Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi. Last year I wrote about Yaghi and Atoco, the startup he founded to commercialize his scientific breakthrough with a device that extracts water from air using just sunlight.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
This project was only possible due to funding from @fwf-at.bsky.social. Thank you very much!
Great work together with Finn Box, Martin Grömmer, Sebastian Antreich, Qun Zhang, Tofayel Ovee, Jean-Francois Louf, Juerg Schoenenberger, David G. Williams, @bokubionami.bsky.social, @mingchaoliu.bsky.social, @hultinelab.bsky.social
One day in the lab, we accidentally discovered that the spines of a cactus 🌵 straighten when exposed to fog. I was intrigued and so were my collaborators. How does this work and what can be gained from it? Here are some of the answers in our new preprint:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
I absolutely love your art 😻
Halfway to I2K is BACK, friends of all kinds! Last year, 650 people attended 30+ TOTALLY FREE image analysis workshops of all kinds, across many timezones.
If you make image analysis software and want to teach it, workshop submissions are open now! We'd love to have your tool highlighted.
Here‘s a rare and excellent career opportunity for outstanding physical oceanographers at the Potsdam Institute (PIK) and the University of Potsdam, in beautiful surroundings just outside Berlin. Tell qualified friends or colleagues! 🌊
www.nature.com/naturecareer...
The use of a highly simplified environment may incur consid- erable collateral damage for all of plant biology; with the current status quo for in- door cultivation, especially of small ephemeral plants such as A. thaliana, similar artificial conditions are replicated
around the world, and there is a substan- tial risk that the phenotypes in this envi- ronment become confused with the base- line of what is ‘‘normal’’ for these plants.
What a statement... (see screenshots)
Great article by @derekseveri.bsky.social et al. on the importance of including "real world" conditions in #PlantScience work, to ensure that one is actually studying plant biology and not just plant behavior in a lab environment.
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Registration for the EMBO workshop ‘Plant evolution: from origins to diversification on land’ closes on 25th August. Don’t miss it! More details can be found here: meetings.embo.org/event/25-pla... 🌱 😀
🚨Don’t miss out! Last weeks left to register for the Plant Computational Biology Workshop 2025, sponsored by @cambup-lifesci.cambridge.org 🌱
📆Deadline 31 July - www.slcu.cam.ac.uk/computationa...
#ComputationalBiology #PlantSci
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.
This is a great article by @joachimgoedhart.bsky.social on @dev-journal.bsky.social about color choice in #DataViz, thenode.biologists.com/data-visuali..., also check out his super useful #DataViz tools at huygens.science.uva.nl 🧪🧬💻
Climate.gov, a major US government website supporting public education on climate science, will likely shut down after almost all of its staff were fired. What would be worse is if the website were co-opted to publish climate denial content.
People who can’t handle criticism are unfit to lead.
Weak leaders fear dissent as a threat to their power. They silence their critics to shield their egos.
Strong leaders welcome dissent as an opportunity for growth. They silence their egos to learn from their critics.
SPS - Summer School 2025 on Advanced Plant Imaging – API : From super-resolution to fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy 🔬🌱 in Versailles 👑🇨🇵
For enthusiastic PhD students or young postdoctoral researchers !
Only one week left to apply 👇
eng-saclay-plant-sciences.hub.inrae.fr/teaching-and...
German anger at its best 😂
Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research
fraudsters have infiltrated the academic publishing industry
Frederik Joelving, Cyril Labbé,
Guillaume Cabanac
theconversation.com/fake-papers-...
American science and medicine has been thrown into chaos and uncertainty over the past week. Here are some stories to get up to speed. 1/12
