Storytelling for Science

Pride month just finished... So why is this relevant for academic publishing? I have a conflict of interest, as this is personal to me. This also means I feel obligated to clarify, educate, and mitigate biases whenever possible.  Sex refers to a set of biological attributes in humans and animals that are associated with physical and physiological features, including chromosome expression, hormone function, and reproductive/sexual anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities of female, male, and gender-diverse people. It influences how people perceive themselves and each other, how they behave and interact, and the distribution of power and resources in society. Terms that define identity Apart from gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people, it is necessary to recognize, Asexual : An individual who experiences a lack of attraction to other persons of any sex or gender. Pansexual : An individual who experiences attraction to people regardless of g...

In a survey on the trends of academic publishing conducted in 2023, reflecting on the need to reformulate the current business model was front of mind. The need to optimize operational efficiencies may stem from the increased adoption of open access (OA) policies. For those not in the know, OA is a practice that enables research outputs to be distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers, including the ability for copy or reuse, by applying an open license for copyright. The mandates  advocated by the Holdren Memo in the US, the Nelson Memo in the UK, and Plan S for the EU consolidated the view that unrestricted access to research publications is part of an integral right for transparency—we want to view the outcomes of taxpayer-funded research. However, many publishers follow a gold OA model and charge an article processing charge (APC), which is typically paid through institutional or grant funding. This means that readers don't pay, because t...

I went to London with a purpose. It’s always good to meet collaborators and friends, but I had other goals with my visit. You see, it’s never good when the decisions that impact us are arrived at without our input. I wanted to bring awareness of my new peer review standards project to those in the publishing industry that can benefit from them. I'm comfortable researching and reviewing, even editing and managing the peer review process, but hearing editors and publishers speak of the big picture issue was an eye-opener. Change is ever present The publishing industry fancies itself as having evolved to explore the heritage and lived experience of minorities, by more frequently placing a spotlight on hidden and undervalued communities. Jonathan Karp, who spoke on the current model of employee ownership that underpins his role as CEO at Simon & Schuster , perfectly exemplified this—with profits now being reinvested in the company, there’s a new collaborative...

I was fired on the 8th March. Not this year, a couple of years ago... It was an inflection point in my life. I had never been fired before. I left jobs, turned down some opportunities for others, but nobody had asked me to leave before the end of my contract or project. Before that meeting. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to say this... I signed a NDA at the time, so I cannot delve into specifics. Suffice it to say, I had to change countries again. That day is engraved in fire in my mind, but the rest was a whirlwind. I rallied strength and support from unknown pieces of me. My family and friends were everything at the time. I sketched a plan and stuck to it. It paid off to be stubborn. I learned confidence in my abilities and to trust my capability to judge people's character and worth. I met so many different people. It brought me to a whole new life. I'll always stand up for what I believe in. Money  It can be used as a bribe or a form of punishment. It provides contro...

Yep. I did.  And decided I would write the guidelines for peer review I wish I had been given. In the traditional publishing model, journal editors choose reviewers based on their expertise. Reviewers can now also choose to post comments on preprints that they have a particular interest in, based on their own research experience.  Crowd-sourced models have also begun to flourish. But there is no definition of what a GOOD peer review is and how to recognise it. We aim to provide curated resources for training, define quality standards, and raise pertinent questions that evolved from the current context in the publishing industry.  We want to help maintain integrity in the peer review process, by involving the community in assessing their own training needs.   Together with some colleagues (Gareth and Jo), we came up with a crowdsourced initiative . And we got some ideas, wishes, and plans. We hope to improve transparency and accountability in the peer review ...

I wanted to know more about DAGs ( directed acyclic graphs ) and how they help people that design experiments account for confounders and other nuisances. This is a lot to do with counterintuitive logic and the many mistakes that observational clinical trials still suffer from. It seemed obvious to me that someone that taught themselves computing and code, who could explain this well and clearly to someone like me, who hates computing, could do so for everybody. Hence, my first guest post... ladies and gents, by Francisco Amaral .      Why is my internet out?   Hypothesis : it's my (internet service provider) ISP's fault. Let's call ISP; they agree, it's their fault. There was an equipment failure on their end that caused connections to and from my router to fail because a certain machine was not working.   Here, we have a simple causal relation — it is physically impossible for data to be transferred through machines ...