@AlexSanterne@academicchatter I don’t think scientists have changed because people haven’t changed, and man is the history of science littered with petty shit
Can #UK#academics explain these spammy emails from publication agencies who want to feature my academic articles? I've been told this this a scam, but I'm not sure how -- do they charge money to do this? Is this related to the dreaded #REF?
As far as I'm concerned, if some publication wants to write a feature based on one of my publications... go for it. You don't need to contact me about it.
So I just learnt that J Physiol requires figures to be made with Biorender (https://www.biorender.com/), a VC backed subscription SaaS extend and extinguish of scientists drawing pictures!
Is this a thing now!? Complete privatisation of the publication workflow!?
Am I the only one enraged by this!? Pictures? We could have just made our own shared repository of useful graphics. Our own open source software. Uggghhh!
Bizarre, yes, but as I said in the original thread, it seems well designed to trick researchers into thinking that it’s a standard that they may as well just use like MS Word.
A relatively tech illiterate lab leader will often just tell their students to use it in the same way they do everything else to please the journals. Because as far as they know illustration already works like documents and MS Word.
@maegul @NicoleCRust@academicchatter
I find all the bad PowerPoint illustrations in biology charming, but I personally take great pride in my illustrations in my work (probably wont be doing biology for the forseeable future) and it makes me sad when people dont, whether that be because they are pressed for time or bc they dont see communicating ideas visually as part of the task of science.
I have tried to introduce diagramming markup like mermaid or graphviz/dot ti my lab to limited success, they are just used to PowerPoint I guess. My cracked copy of illustrator 2019 is basically always open. Turning figure design into some drag and drop biorender task (in addition to the platform capture element as u say) is sad to me bc it feels like the final flattening of illustration as a proud tradition in biology.
Got this email earlier and I’m still upset about it. Some unnamed “team from #Northwestern, #Stanford & #Cornell” fed our preprint through their “#AI" to generate "suggestions" on how we could improve it.
This feels like some really shit #HCI study that seems to think asking for consent is optional. And like one that wants to spin out into an even shittier start-up in the future (hence not giving any names of team members)?
I'm invited to be jury of a #PhD thesis in #Porto 🇵🇹 which defence could be attended either in person or remotely. I find a decent route by #train from #Marseille 🇫🇷 , via #Madrid 🇪🇸 for a total of 4 trains to reach the destination and about 2 days in the train / stations, both ways for 2 days in Porto.
Regardless of the cost,, and considering the potentiel benefit in terms of exemplarity, would you attend in person ?
@AlexSanterne
I think you know the answer already. 😃
And I'm pretty sure it will be also a better experience for the candidate, in particular if you have the chance to talk to him/her in person before the defence. @jknodlseder@academicchatter
@noctuaminervae Author-year is probably easier to navigate. My real problem with it is that it’s ugly. An entry in an author-title bibliography reads like a sentence; the year/ date in author-year interrupts. I appreciate that bibliographies aren't generally read from beginning to end, but even so...
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 Tarleton State University would not "tolerate intolerable behavior."
@rspfau@vfrmedia@gemlog@petersuber@academicchatter
Thanks for this link. People who sign up for leadership positions in higher ed and have not the smallest tolerance for dissent or discomfort are truly baffling to me. I hope this (by all accounts) fine teacher lands well somewhere else.
@ml@academicchatter unfortunately for comp bio/bioinformatics/regulatory genomics, it's still mostly Twitter. Which is annoying, because I'm no longer on twitter.
Like, we are probably over represented here, but it's nothing compared to twitter.
What will change for academic institutions as the climate crisis is increasingly not some far-off future, but happening now? And are we preparing our students for these uncomfortable conversations?
Well, generally the best cooling shelters for cattle (and sheep, and just about any living being for that matter) are trees ;) This is why agroforestry is one of the fields that I think we should be investigating- or one of the reasons, there are a lot of good reasons to stimulate agroforestry in terms of sustainability. It is gaining attention in the EU (though still very niche by comparison to intensive livestock farming).
Isn't it weird that acceptance rate is a thing we look for in a conference/journal?
Publishing a paper should not be competitive like "we take the top 20% paper", it should be "we take all papers that are good enough according to our standards". Sometimes it can be a very low or very high number depending on the quality of the paper submitted.
@solalnathan@TEG@academicchatter@phdstudents sadly LLMs have made paper mills overwhelmingly efficient. Even before, the imbalance between authors and reviewers posed constraints to the number of papers that can be carefully evaluated: now it is getting worse. In this context, the acceptance rate makes even less sense (cheap submissions drive it artificially down) as a proxy for reviewing quality and selectivity. But I believe the whole process is not sustainable anymore. Alternatives anyone?
Can anyone provide (me) a (link to a) list of Twitch.tv streams that someone interested in these protests could watch? I've never used/watched Twitch, yet,
@MHowell@TheConversationUS@academicchatter@taylorlorenz there's plenty of independent journalist covering this very well on plenty of channels. The Breakthrough News, The Grayzone, Glenn Greenwald, even Democracy Now has been doing better than usual and giving protesters a platform.
There must be an easier way to work with review/submission websites.
One registers a master password with the publisher that works for all journals. Every time an account is created with a new journal of this publisher, the master password is linked to it and one could start right away @academicchatter#ScientificPublishing
@ingorohlfing@pkraus@academicchatter I haven't seen ORCID being used for authentication with conference/journal submission systems. But they do so for some services such as Overleaf.
@jtmuehlberg@ingorohlfing@pkraus@academicchatter I have used it for some, just yesterday for a review submitted through editorialmanager.com (whoever runs that service (?), it was for a Bristol University Press journal). Works fine, and a good use case for ORCID I agree.
@RonaldVisser@academicchatter totally agree that it is a problem that being unlucky to end up in a toxic department does not make the existence of the toxic department OK.
by the way, now that I work in Germany I learned that in Germany this department was widely known as being toxic at that time already, so there were also mentoring issues in the sense that she was not warned what she was getting into. Very sad.
@freyablekman@academicchatter
So sad! I know all too well that some people can create toxic environments and that you are not always warned beforehand... I think that she correctly identifies some causes on her video. I hope the future of academia will be more open and more supportive and less a competitive rat race...
Yesterday I finished writing a research paper that I've been working on (as time permitted) for about the last 9 months or so.
The only thing left to do is find a journal or conference to send it to.
Is it better to submit it to a journal, or should I wait until next year for a conference? There's follow-up work that I plan to do, but the paper is already pretty condensed, so I'm not sure if expanding it before submitting somewhere makes sense.
@floe@academicchatter Yeah, it's CS - geometry specifically. I should probably have included that... :)
I just missed the deadline for the CGVC conference (https://cgvc.org.uk), and was considering IEEE Access as the journal. If the dates worked for me then I'd look at GRAPP (https://grapp.scitevents.org/).
Unfortunately I've not published many papers, so I don't have a good feel for selecting the right "level" of conference/journal.