Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

@pre perhaps we will return to a pre Facebook internet experience. Perhaps this will backfire and we will have less monoliths and more distributed niche forums. Does every interest need the same platform to build a community?

Today
* Reddit ends free API access.
* Twitter turns off anonymous reading.
* Youtube is talking about banning ad-blocking users.

The tech industry was living on cheep money and low interest rates, and now they're all afraid to let their precious content get used for AI training.

The walls are going up, the lawful corporate web is collapsing in on itself.

After a day of running into multiple accessibility barriers while attempting to do multiple online things, I just needed to come here to say thank you to everyone on Mastodon who participates in creating a small corner where I don't feel like an afterthought. I appreciate the dedication to alt text and video descriptions so, so much, and I know many people have already said it, but I don't think it can ever be overstated.

New posting! This one is about the number of unpaid hours in #academia, an insight that's come from the realisation of how much time I'm still committing despite now (currently) being unemployed. To what extent is academic research sustained by the massive expenditure of unpaid labour? How much unpaid overtime do you think you're clocking? Let's lift the lid...

https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2023/06/29/pro-bono-a-riff-on-unpaid-labour-in-academia/

In a new video @geerlingguy spots the #enshittification of #RedHat #Linux quoting @pluralistic thanks to the new Redhat source code paywall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8

Turnitin acknowledged that its AI detector sucks
https://www.utimes.pitt.edu/news/teaching-center-doesn-t?fbclid=IwAR1Lp40fzkpNbWFPt1J-CeUBzbk8ENplO0Z2jgff1_AumOiZSe80R79vOE4

The Company of Biologists is excited to announce the launch of its new mastodon instance @biologists.social, on which you can now find all our journals and community sites. We look forward to sharing more news about this new community in the coming days.

While big tech tries to force employees back to the office, smaller tech companies are using remote work as a competitive advantage to hire and retain talent. 81% of firms <5,000 employees allow remote work or have a remote work options.

""If you require someone to move to a certain location, you are inherently limiting the talent pool that you’re going to be working with." @zuhayeer
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/20/23762655/tech-perk-remote-work-freedom-airbnb-yelp

You are doing #Bioinformatics? Would you say data analysis requires interactive work, e.g. using jupyter, rstudio, etc.? Or would you prefer using a workflow system, e.g. #snakemake, #nextflow, #galaxy, etc.?

I am not talking about visualization, though. Visualization is important and can be achieved regardless of the approach.

Please boost. Thank you.

Great job for someone who wants to bring down Elsevier

"Do you believe we can break out of the culture of publish-or-perish, and find new and fair ways to evaluate the contributions researchers make to society?

We are seeking a motivated, proactive and organised individual to develop and deliver a research outputs analytics service across the university."

Full time, permanent
£41-50k
Imperial College London Library

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/description/ACA00173/research-outputs-analyst

#OpenScience #REF2028 #ScholComms

@WhyNotZoidberg @GalmeshRosewood If you’ve held a “Save” icon in your hands, that makes you ancient now.

When even your coffee is horrified by how early you had to get up.

#coffee #mondaymornings #monday #humor #humour #funny

“We welcome proposals to found new journals as well as proposals to transfer existing journals to PsychOpen GOLD (e.g., transforming a subscription based journal to an Open Access journal). Applications are invited from scientists and scholarly societies from all parts of the world.

PsychOpen GOLD journals are published completely free of charge for readers, authors, and editors or scholarly societies (Diamond Open Access)”

See details :
https://psychopen.eu/call2023/

#openaccess #diamondOA

That thing when you've been waiting for a submission to get peer reviewed for over a year and the journal has periodically written you to say they are trying but nobody will review it and then you finally get the reviews and they are 1) seemingly responding to a completely different text and/or 2) suggesting you shift the main focus to something you clearly decided to NOT focus on (for obvious reasons).

Now to craft the reply to this nightmare and ask myself again why we didn't just withdraw it and send it elsewhere. But also, to question the usefulness of these reviews and ask myself if they did a single thing to improve the piece. (Uh, yeah, no).

I also realize peer review is a broken system and I myself have declined MANY requests over the past year due to illness as many other folks have since #longCOVID is in fact a mass disabling event and will impact all the free labor we used to do.

But still, had to have a gripe.

@academicchatter #AcademicPublishing

First day on Mastodon, great news to share already: The
@EUCouncil
calls for #transparent, #equitable, and #openaccess to scholarly publications, urging a shift towards free dissemination of research:

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/05/23/council-calls-for-transparent-equitable-and-open-access-to-scholarly-publications/

#BPA #Bisphenols #EndocrineDisruptors

I was going through some old files and ran into a nice video that was made of my work by Janeene Chatowsky when she was a film student. It describes our 2016 Endocrinology study investigating the impact of bisphenols (some of which are used in BPA-free products) on development of the reproductive system. Thought I'd share--it may be new info for some of you.

Two minute video here: https://vimeo.com/169013906

As PhD student, I only have little experience in being a reviewer in #PeerReview. But I always try to give concrete suggestions for improving unclear sections/sentences/missing information. Being concrete helps to be modest and keep away the idea that there is an 'ideal text' somewhere in my mind (to which my papers would never live up either).
However, this could be a different story if I had to do a review per week...

PSA, if someone asks you for contact info (e.g. a phone number) of someone you know, the correct response is "I can't give that to you, but I can give them yours".

It's efficient and adds no round-trips, it's privacy friendly, it's non-awkward and it's social engineering resistant. It's a universally good rule.

And the corollary, of course: Don't ask someone for another person's contact info - ask them to pass on yours.