My friend, Prof John Bennett has finally written the piece of work he's debated on writing for four years and it's a level-headed assessment of academia in Australia, how we got to where we are and what needs to change to support the people in the system. "BREAKING POINT – THE CRISIS IN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES" https://soilinsights.com/resources/f/breaking-point-–-the-crisis-in-australian-universities #Academia
Why is it concerning that the analysis relies entirely on Matlab toolboxes?
1. Reproducing the analysis requires access to the exact toolbox with the exact version number. May also have platform dependencies (e.g., outputs slightly different results on macos, linux, and windows). 2. Often the version of the toolbox is not reported. It isn't in this paper. 3. Increased use of the toolbox may lead to price gouging, excluding many who can't afford to purchase it. Besides the unfairness, this impacts the ability of just about anyone to reproduce the analysis from the raw data. 4. After some years the toolbox may not be available at all, for example if the company considers its maintenance a burden with negative returns on investment.
If you are a reviewer or an editor: at the very least demand the reporting of the toolbox version and the operating system version where it was run. And ideally demand enough specification of the algorithms used by the functions provided in the toolbox that an independent reimplementation and reanalysis is possible.
The #Inkscape 1.4 will be released in less than 24h and it has some neat features including (but obviously not limited to) "Affinity Designer File Import" and "Support for internal links in exported PDF files".
I know lots of people in #academia use (or used to use) Affinity Designer. This is your chance to go OpenSource and free yourself from that limiting ecosystem.
Many UK universities are in a financial crisis. But the government is leaving them to flounder, treating higher education as a private-sector industry and research as a public investment.
Point in case: "They could then take credit for the work on their CVs to gain a boost in professional evaluations. Some may have additional self-interest: Several reviewers asked the author to include citations to their own papers, and some authors complied."
Academic Twitter was great, & it breaks my heart that the community I found there has done so little to rebuild on Mastodon, even tho Mast is far better. I loved learning abt new research & pubs (& occasionally posting abt my own). A fair # of people migrated to Mast but most didn't stay, at least in my field of literary studies.
What can academics do to build & rebuild academic exchange on Mastodon?
Post the kind of posts you want to see. Tell your colleagues. Email links to good posts to colleagues. Mention your handle in Mastodon in conference talks as a way to reach you.
All of that was done to promote Twitter, unwittingly. Now we can do it purposefully, until it becomes self-sustaining.
Have you ever thought about questionable research practices (QRPs) in academia?
The Retraction Watch team have highlighted this new paper in PLoSOne that has a systematic analysis. The authors identify 25 QRPs and then survey a lot of academics.
The results are interesting, widespread use of QRPs, sort of a grey area of acedemic behaviour, with some explanatory factors.
!!! A big Zotero update!! Exciting!! 🥳 My favourite: “Hovering over a citation or internal link now opens a popup showing the associated reference or figure. No need to jump back and forth just to check a reference.” So cool!! #Zotero #ReferenceManager #Academia
I often get invited to speak at bizarre meetings that are not in my field of expertise. I have often wondered what these meetings must be like, or if they really exist.
He complained about the high price of parking. He disputed the President's numbers in a "cordial" but "tense" public meeting on the topic. He turned over the research documenting his numbers. Two and a half weeks later, the provost fired him, explaining that #TarletonStateUniversity would not "tolerate intolerable behavior."
Inkscape, Johnny, Inkscape. But you know that already 😀
For figure panels, for posters, even for presentations now with its multi-page documents. Works brilliantly. I could not have done my work as a scientist over the last 20 years without #inkscape.
Inkscape has existed for 20+ years and, thanks to the power of open source, will continue to exist for decades to come, when all these and more subscription services have come and gone.
"We’re so fixated on metrics because they determine funding for a university based on where it is in the rankings. So it comes from there and then it filters down. "
Here's a question for #academia: why shouldn't I count my contributions to major open-source projects which are scientifically relevant (e.g. Linux [1], OpenCV [2]) just like publications?
- They have a unique identifier. - They are most certainly peer-reviewed (if you don't believe me, try to submit a Linux patch sometime) - They are archived long-term. - They are publicly available.
Based on #10050, here's a first alpha implementation of the Camera2 adapter class which should allow zero-copy access to preview image data. Comments very welcome.
Known issues at the moment:
tuto...
Counting citations hasn't been a reliable measure of scientific impact for a while, especially on platforms like Google Scholar that compile info from random documents. Hyper-authorship, predatory journals, etc have all contributed to the problem.
This preprint just drives home how important it is to measure scientific impact more carefully and without reliance on automated metrics
The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest.
I've submitted a paper to one of the well-reputable journals and received two reviews asking for a revision. One of the reviews is on-topic and helpful. The other, however, I suspect was generated ...
Job! An endowed professorship at Arizona State University in the systematics and taxonomy of ants. A rare opportunity for the right sort of ant nerd/desert rat.
From Chris Brink: "It is not difficult to construct a university ranking. What is needed is not so much any technical skill as enough blind self-confidence to tell the world that the arbitrary choices you have made in constructing your ranking actually represent reality." https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20231024130858697
Cuts are coming to the Mansfield Library’s collections to address a more than $300,000 funding gap.When University of Montana students access the library’s onli
The root of the issue is the model of academic funding, positions and evaluation.
2 or 3 year grants are ridiculous, particularly if it takes another 2 or 3 years to even get them to begin with. Even 5 year grants are ridiculous. Abolish grants. If an experimentalist faculty position doesn't come with core funding to begin with, it's like a guarantee of wasted time and effort.
Just like grants don't need to be big, core funding doesn't need to be big either. Large sums stifle innovation, prevent creativity, foster more of the same at scale rather than new approaches. Large sums in research are like hidden transfers of research funds to companies, i.e., to purchase large equipment or contract out software engineering, instead of clever yet slow development in house. Lean teams with the freedom and security to be able to run for years please.
Spread the risk, diversify the portfolio, remain focused on core competencies. If 19 professors don't accomplish much other than reasonably good undergraduate teaching and modest research findings or none at all, and the 20th
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The root of the issue is the model of academic funding, positions and evaluation.
2 or 3 year grants are ridiculous, particularly if it takes another 2 or 3 years to even get them to begin with. Even 5 year grants are ridiculous. Abolish grants. If an experimentalist faculty position doesn't come with core funding to begin with, it's like a guarantee of wasted time and effort.
Just like grants don't need to be big, core funding doesn't need to be big either. Large sums stifle innovation, prevent creativity, foster more of the same at scale rather than new approaches. Large sums in research are like hidden transfers of research funds to companies, i.e., to purchase large equipment or contract out software engineering, instead of clever yet slow development in house. Lean teams with the freedom and security to be able to run for years please.
Spread the risk, diversify the portfolio, remain focused on core competencies. If 19 professors don't accomplish much other than reasonably good undergraduate teaching and modest research findings or none at all, and the 20th hits it big enough to pay back for the whole lot of them and beyond: that's a win. Universities are meant to teach in the first place. Patents and discoveries are a plus.
Stop the metrics. Not only they've long fallen prey to Goodhart's law, it's also that, fundamentally, the number of publications doesn't matter. And citations of a publication don't matter. What matters is real world impact, which takes time, and can't be measured with convenient yet short-term focused and profoundly misleading tools that the likes of #RELX peddle to academic departments, relying heavily on numbers of publications and citations.
So true – it's nigh impossible to weigh the impact of research but years afterwards. Ask the microbiologists who were studying extremophile bacteria in a Yellowstone pond whether they thought their work would lead to the sequencing of the human genome and modern medicine as we know it. Or ask the zoologists who pulled out bioluminescent and fluorescent jelly fish out of the sea whether they thought scientific research in developmental biology, neuroscience and biology as a whole, remarkably even DNA sequencing, would be so thoroughly transformed. And these are just two examples in biology.
"New data released Thursday by the National Science Foundation show the exodus of young life scientists from the Ivory Tower to industry has reached the highest level in nearly three decades, deepening concerns about the future of academic science in the U.S....Ph.D. graduates are now pursuing postdocs at the lowest rate since at least 1995, based on STAT’s review of NSF data available online."
Those who follow non-linear career trajectories often face disadvantages in academia. This Perspective looks at why individuals might choose non-linear careers and how these benefit diversity in science.
Hoping to see some new #science folks exploring Mastodon so figured it’s time for another #introduction - I’m Mya, a professor at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science. Our lab studies #microbes (bacteria, viruses, protists) in the oceans and other environments and also works on #fish egg identification. I also post about my cute dog and cat a lot! #USFCMS #ocean #marine #oceanography #microbiology #virology #research #seagrass #urchin #academia
Within themes, #eLife makes no distinction between old-style articles (where editors decided whether a manuscript is accepted) and reviewed preprints (where authors decide instead). Keep in mind both have the reviews attached, including as of recently a brief assessment paragraph summarizing, with a controlled vocabulary, the significance of findings and, more importantly, the strength of evidence.
Preprints that have been invited for review by eLife are published as Reviewed Preprints and include an eLife assessment, public reviews and a response from the authors (if available).
For anyone on the fence about #eLife's new publishing model, note there is no such thing as an "eLife paper", since the purpose of the review process in scientific publishing is to provide accurate, constructive reviews to authors. In modern times, dissemination doesn't depend on mailed-in printed periodicals.
Each eLife publication has an evaluation attached to it in the form of an assessment–be it negative or positive. Critically, authors decide whether to go forward with assessments as they are and go public, or to revise the manuscript and request re-review to improve both the manuscript and, consequently, the reviews and assessment.
In other words, nothing changed, except, it's the authors who decide how to move forward with their own manuscript, rather than the editors.
Hello, world! We are the Climatematch team and we just landed on Mastodon. Climatematch Academy is a wide-reaching, inclusive and approachable program aimed to introduce computational methods for climate science. You can find more information about us on our website https://academy.climatematch.io/ Follow us for the latest update on our upcoming online course on July 17-28, 2023. cc @neuromatch
What is Climatematch Academy?
Climatematch Academy (CMA) is a wide-reaching, inclusive and approachable program aimed to introduce computational methods for climate science.
Good thinking and important questions there, recommended reading. It surely contrasts with the inner desire to be generous in providing constructive inputs in peer review, the feeling that one should do more than just saying "nah, evidence not really strong enough for that argument".
My feeling is that generous feedback would be welcome and great *if* the relationship between author and peer reviewer was more equal and open. As things stand, the author *needs* to get the article published, and has all incentives to do what is necessary to get it through... which are often not aligned with openly engaging with generous comments.
So what's the way forward? I'd suppose that if this is the way forward, then it would be up to journal editors to be much more specific in detailing what kind of review they expect and welcome, and what kind of comments are not only not required, but actively, kindly, discouraged.
As a reviewer (mostly) for area studies journals, I now feel more clearly that I am probably given too much freedom to interpret what good peer review is.
All things considered, being less generous may mean being more helpful. And of course, always be kind!
Thanks again to @katederickson for the thoughtful article!
![CSH 8 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory bioRxiv THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY HOME | SUBMIT| FAQ | BLOG| ALERTS / RSS| ABOUT | CHANNELS Search Advanced Search New Results View current version of this article A Follow this preprint Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans iD Saul Justin Newman doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080 This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. * 0 || У 255| Abstract Full Text Info/History Metrics](https://keybored.me/photo/preview/640/1207435 "CSH 8 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory bioRxiv THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY HOME | SUBMIT| FAQ | BLOG| ALERTS / RSS| ABOUT | CHANNELS Search Advanced Search New Results View current version of this article A Follow this preprint Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans iD Saul Justin Newman doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080 This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. * 0 || У 255| Abstract Full Text Info/History Metrics")
