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.
AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.
It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.
Ha
AFAIU, two platforms other than mastodon (lemmy and discourse) have issues federating because at least one of them is trying federate well with mastodon (for obvious reasons). The mastodon quirk causing issues is, AFAIU, the way it kinda mangles articles and pages (long form formats in ActivityPub), which are appropriate for forums and link-aggregators like lemmy and discourse. So someone hints been done to work well with mastodon’s mangling, which hurts lemmy-discourse interop
