Storytelling for Science

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 ...

I started the year teaching... I had never taught part of an online workshop before. I attended many and may even have thought about it, but I wasn't sure I had anything new to say. It turns out, I kind of did.  I focused on how to best write the methods section of a research paper in the life sciences. To some people, this is the easiest section to write because it does not involve much “story”, it is instead a description of all the steps taken that led to the study’s findings.  A clear methods section impacts editorial evaluation and readers’ understanding. Transparency creates trust and is the key to ensuring the credibility of the research. Reproducibility relies on detail, so never  methods should never be summarized or abbreviate d without giving full details in a discoverable supplemental section. I learned a lot in the last 3 years. Regarding writing, publishing, and science communication. But there are concepts that researchers still have not fully adopted, eit...

It is us! We are supporting others because we care about open access! OASPA is a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarship. Its varied membership provides a proven venue for productive collaboration. Open access stakeholders include not only scholar-led and professional publishers of books and journals, but also infrastructure and other services. I believe that authors and other content providers, such as graphic designers and independent consultants, should be informed about the organizations that influence policy-making in their area of expertise. Although my scientific publications have significantly declined in volume (but more are a-coming...), I work with and for authors, helping them navigate their publication journey, be it through help with writing, research design, or publication. It is good to have the help and support of OASPA and Reviewer Credits, and to have learnt so much with Bio-Protocol and Cactus Communications . Soon it will be Love Me...

I've been a good reviewer, not given in to unwarranted comments on laguage, not given in to unjustified criticism, and always submitting my reports on time.  I think I deserve some gifts 😝 Peer reviewer recognition wouldn't go amiss.  Here are some thoughts on how to make the academic reviewers in your life a bit happier, relaxed, and less prone to behaving like Reviewer 2 . 1. Institutions should allocate time for peer review within their faculty appointments The time it takes to do a good job with a peer review is often underestimated. ⏳ Given that this work is not financially compensated, at least time for it should be granted as part of the expected commitment to the scholarly community. 2. Graduate courses could teach peer review, much like they teach statistics There are techniques, concepts, and skills required to perform peer review. It is important ...