Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

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.

Am I misunderstanding something?

This appears to be a stunningly irresponsible story in Science, claiming that up to 30% of the scientific literature is fake.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common

Below, the first two paragraphs of the story.

h/t @Hoch

I've always been very proud to have a very diverse lab. I think this picture of our names in different languages sums it up nicely. Note it's an incomplete list because not all members were present (we would also have vietnamese).

Finally, a solution to the unfairness of authorship ordering in scientific papers! 😂

"Every Author as First Author"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01393

A pre-LLM snapshot of Wikipedia — frozen, meaning no new edits, you know, like an encyclopedia — would be a good thing. Because of course Wikipedia will be the number one target for people and forces trying to build fake legends.

https://xoxo.zone/@fraying/110328251695008281

It sounds trivial and obvious, but are you reading error bars correctly?

Do you know whether you're looking at standard errors (measures of inferential uncertainty), standard deviations (measures of spread of individual observations), or 95% confidence intervals around the mean?

And are your intuitions about what each of these mean correct?

Here's a nice primer, refresher, or teaching article.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2659

h/t @jakehofman

Inspired by Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics, Anne Urai and Clare Kelly imagine an ‘academic doughnut’ for rethinking academia for climate action.

🎧 Listen in the #eLifePodcast
https://elifesciences.org/podcast/episode86?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

⚪ Ein Baumbild und ... ein
Lieblingsfoto. 🧐
🟤 A tree picture and ... a
favorite photo. 🌳
📷 by Artist: #EdselJamesBatuigas in Loc.: #BritishColumbia Canada 🇨🇦 - Title: "Hiding in plain sight." - #Streetart #Art #Mastoart #Owl
#Photography #Fotografie #Tree #Wildlive #Camouflage
➡️ #APhotoLove see you👋

The Guardian covers the story of the mass resignation of "Neuroimage" (published by Elsevier) editorial board.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees

#elsevier #OpenAccess #Neuroscience #ScienceMastodon

Do you read people's profile info before you follow them? Please boost for a bigger sample size, because I'm really curious about this

Ok. So recently, #Tesla had published an "Impact Report" which contained a slide presenting some "data" that their #Autopilot and #FSDBeta products "enhance safety".

And one article and one Twitter thread caught my eye in scrutinizing these numbers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-again-paints-a-very-misleading-story-with-their-crash-data/

https://twitter.com/NoahGoodall/status/1651323363099553793

While the analyses and arguments in this article and thread are not necessarily wrong, there are more fundamental issues here that need to be surfaced in my view... so let's take a look.

Calling all Kiwis. Please listen to these recordings https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/fleurs/viewer/mi_nz/train. If you recognize any of those voices, please help us get in contact with these speakers as we're trying to understand HOW this data was collected. Why is this an issue? Read https://blog.papareo.nz/whisper-is-another-case-study-in-colonisation/

Me: Did you know that cars produce nitric oxide as they burn fuel

You: NO?

Me: Yeah nitric oxide.

#ChemistryJokes

TIL: lace cards

It’s a computer punch card with every possible spot punched out, so what remains is a flimsy filamentous net of paper that instantly tears and jams up the card reader.

Old-school denial of service attack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lace_card