Social media for scientists, circa summer 2023

Twitter is now X and its credibility is shattered. Even though a lot of people keep using it, but it’s the grudging use of people who are mostly only doing it because they have to.

So both personally and professionally, I’ve been looking at other social media platforms. In my view, only two are serious contenders for filling the void left by the gross mismanagement of Twitter.

BlueSky is the new science Twitter. It’s filled with the early adopters of Twitter, the Internet experimenters and science communicators. T-shirt and jeans. And the vibe is very much the freewheeling, ever-so-slightly – okay, maybe more than slightly – anarchic vibe of the early science online days.

Mastodon is  the new Academic Twitter. (The use of capitals is deliberate.) It’s got the feel of a lot of the late adopters of Twitter. The ones who were sort of persuaded that they could use a social media platform social media for promoting their brand and posting critiques of papers and doing, you know, being a serious scholar online. Polo shirts and slacks. The vibe is ever-so-slight slightly – okay, maybe more than slightly – po-faced and straight-laced.

Now, of course, your mileage may vary. These are my own personal impressions, not back up by any data. And to be clear, I am not saying that either is better than the other. There are clearly communities developing on both platforms that are finding worthwhile discussions.

External links

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty

Space: 1999 is now further in the past than it was set in the future

Space: 1999 first aired on October 17, 1975. Unusually for a science fiction show, it gave a quite precise date for when its events started unfolding.

The first episode, “Breakaway,” is set on September 13, 1999. (September 13 is now known as “Breakaway Day” among series fans.)

That means, according to a handy duration calculator, that the first episode of Space: 1999 was set 23 years, 10 months, 27 days in the future. Or 8,732 days, if you prefer.

Today marks 8,732 days since September 13, 1999. 

The show is now officially more retro than it was ever futuristic.

Man, I’m old. But I still love the Eagle transporters, though.

Malaysia puts pressure on researcher’s publication choices

Previously, I organized a roundtable discussion for the tenth anniversary of DORA about institutions trying to “put a thumb on the scale” of researchers’ decisions about what journal to publish in. 

For brevity, I called these “bans.” But I know that in many cases, these were not true “bans.” Researchers could still publish in journals from particular publishers, but there was no doubt that the intention was to get researchers not to use particular venues.

Little did I know that an entire nation would use the power of the state in this way.

With some optical character recognition and Google Translate, the letter appears to say roughly this:

CHIEF DIRECTOR OF HIGHER EDUCATION
DIRECTOR GENERAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Department of Higher Education
Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia 

Date 13 July 2023

PROHIBITION OF USING GOVERNMENT FUNDS TO PUBLISH IN THREE INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS

With all due respect I refer to the matter at the base.

2. For the information of YBhg. Tan Sri/Datuk/DatolProf., Post-Cabinet Meeting of the Ministry of Higher Education No. 9/2023 discussed the issue of the involvement of academics who publish articles in predatory journals and poor quality journals. In this regard, the Ministry is very serious about the aspect of academic integrity and authority in research and publication activities. One (1) special committee has been created by the Ministry as an effort to control the publication of poor quality journals in order to improve the level of academic ethics, and to protect the good name of IPT and the country.

3. Therefore, the Ministry does not allow Public Universities to use the Public Fund allocation for any publication published by three (3) publishers namely Hindawi, Frontier and MDPI with immediate effect. The Ministry also advises that each University can play a role in monitoring issues related to the quality of publications more carefully in the future.

4. The cooperation and attention of YBhg. Tan Sri/Datuk/Dato7Prof. regarding this matter is greatly appreciated and preceded by a word of thanks.

"MALAYSIA MADAM" "SERVING THE COUNTRY"

I am the one who trusts,

PROF. DR. Azlinda Binto Azman

Needless to say, this made me think the roundtable was a good idea. And that these policies are problematic. The basis for this decision is completely opaque – at least in this letter. Maybe there are some more background on the Higher Education ministry website, but I haven’t had a chance to search and apply Google Translate to find out if it exists or not.

Hat tip to Mohammed Al-Amr for posting this.

Related posts

“Publisher bans & DORA” roundtable recording and notes

Social media update

There has been a proliferation of sites trying to take advantage of disaffected users leaving Twitter.

I have been creating  accounts, of course, mostly to keep anyone from grabbing my preferred handle. Here’s the update of where you can find me.

• Bluesky: @doctorzen.bsky.social
  
• Mastadon: @DoctorZen@scholar.social
• Threads: doctorzen.threads.net

Will any of these survive? Or will they go the way of Google Plus?

 

Professional news: I’m now at DORA!

So, uh, I’ve got a new job. And it6s is the first time an organization has sent out an announcement of my hire.

It’s going to be a big new challenge. Lucky for me I love big new challenges!

External links

A warm welcome to DORA’s new Program Director Zen Faulkes

Twitter owner cures millions of social media addiction

The title of this post is the joke I would normally make on Twitter. 

Except now the number of tweets people can read is being limited and I don’t want to use anyone’s reading limit up unnecessarily,

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781198/twitter-daily-reading-limit-elon-musk-verified-paywall 

https://news.sky.com/story/twitter-applies-temporary-reading-limits-for-all-users-elon-musk-announces-12913108

The reason given for imposing a reading limit sounds weird. But that subscribers get to read 100 times more tweets than everyone else feels like a dumb ploy to get more people to pay for Twitter verification.

I keep waiting to get invitations to Bluesky, which seems to be the best candidate to take over as the major social media platform. And I am glad that I never stopped blogging.

Edit, 2 July 2022: Apparently the reading limits are a direct result of the owner of Twitter not paying the bills. That they were going to stop payments to Google Cloud was reported weeks ago.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 74: Design your slides for your audience, not social media

 Recently I spotted this conference slide shared on Twitter.

A slide with no visuals, just a wide screen of four paragraphs of text.

I thought we had all agreed not to do these any more?

At first I thought this was just crazy, but then I realized there might (and I stress might) be a something else at play here: social media. Typically, a good slide for a presentation is visual and had minimal text. The speaker provides the words, not the slide.

But a disadvantage of slides that are well designed for the audience is that they don’t make much sense without the speaker. They lack context. They aren’t portable.

This slide is the conference equivalent of someone taking screenshots of newspaper articles to get around Twitter’s character limits. Sure, the slide sucks for the audience in the room, but it’s great if you share it on Twitter, since the slide leaves no doubt exactly what the person’s point is.

I’m now very nervous that we’re going to start seeing conference slides backsliding into the old bad habits of “death by PowerPoint¨ with huge blocks of text that people will read, word for word, with the excuse being that “more people will share it on socials.”

Please make your slides for the audience in the room with you. It’s respectful. You want to share something on social media? Design something specifically for Twitter or INstagram or Bluesky or whatever.