What happened to Matters?

A few years ago, a journal launched called Matters. The interesting thing about this journal was that it was devoted to single observations. Science magazine saw fit to write about Matters, so it’s not like it was hidden in a dark hole under the stairs somewhere.

The journal homepage is now offline.

The journal’s Twitter account hasn’t sent tweeted since 2019. The person behind the journal, Lawrence Rajendran, is still active on Twitter, however.

Worst of all, I can’t find articles published in Matters using the DOI. They seem to have completely vanished into the ether. (There was a cool one about hermit crabs.)

I’d noticed that Matters vanished a while ago, but couldn’t tell you when. But I was reminded because I learned of MicroPublication Biology. It seems to be trying the exact same thing Matters did: offer per reviewed publication for single short papers that don’t fit into some larger narrative.

I’m skeptical of MicroPublication Biology because nobody’s name appears anywhere in the journal’s website that I can find. Who is the editor? Are there associate editors? 

But I’m also skeptical because, well, we had Matters. And it tanked. It would be nice to know the full backstory of the journal, but even without that, I think it’s fair to say Matters didn’t take the academic publishing world by storm. It may be that this is a service that people say they want, but when push comes to shove, their actions don’t back up their words. Maybe researcher would rather publish “complete stories” – with all the ambiguity and frustration of what that phrase means.

External links

Got just a single observation? New journal will publish it

Matters description on PubLons

Lessons from megapodes: You can waste a lot of time trying to save time

In his book Last Chance to See (co-authored with Mark Carwadine), Douglas Adams describes nesting by megapode birds. Megapodes don’t build a typical next out of sticks and feathers and mud and the like. Instead, they build these enormous mounds, stacked with decaying vegetable matter.  Compost, basically. As the compost decays, it generates enough heat to incubate the megapode’s eggs.

In his often imitated but never equalled style, Adams wrote:

So all the megapode has to do to incubate its eggs is to dig three cubic yards of earth out of the ground, fill it with three cubic yards of rotting vegetation, collect a further six cubic yards of vegetation, build it into a mound, and then continually monitor the heat it is producing and run about adding bits or taking bits away.

And thus it saves itself all the bother of sitting on its eggs from time to time.

Put like that, it doesn’t seem like that much of a time saver.

To get those numbers of megapode nest size to put into his book, Adams had to do some calculating. Two facts about Adams are relevant here.

1. He was an early Apple fanboy.
2. He was a notorious procrastinator.

Not satisfied with pen and paper or a spreadsheet, Adams wrote a complete program in HyperCard to calculate the volume of megapode nests on his Mac. It is a rather beautiful little app for the time.

Adams was naturally aware of the parallel between himself and the megapode.

I’ve just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give me the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest(.)

I see a tendency in a lot of scientists (myself included) to build megapode nests. Because some existing solution fails in one way, we will create elaborate schemes and software to do something that is ostensibly “better” in that one way. 

The amount of time spent can be large.

The potential re-use of that solution for yourself, never mind others, can be tiny.

And the moral of the story is: Before you start some project because you don’t like the existing solutions, ask if you’re acting like a megapode parent.

External links

Douglas Adams’s megapode next volume calculator

 Picture from here.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs reviewed

“Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.” – Robert Frost

We got both at the end of the Cretaceous. Heat pulse. Impact winter. It didn’t end the world, but it came closer than anything before or since.

Look back at old books about dinosaurs, and you might see something like, “We may never know why they went extinct.” It’s amazing how much we can learn in one lifetime. We learned about Chixulub impact, the presumptive “smoking gun” meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs, decades ago.

But no account that I have ever read before The Last Days of the Dinosaurs delivered such a clear and compelling explanation for why dinosaurs went extinct, but birds, mammals, and a few other lineages didn’t.

The answer seems to be down in the underground.

Black paints a vivid picture of a world on fire after the meteor struck. The air temperature with like an oven and forests lit up like matches. Unlike forest fires today, animals could not hope to outrun the flames by crossing a lake or fiver. The only way out was down, into the ground. An ankylosaur or ceratopsian or tyrannosaur couldn’t do that, but small mammals and birds could. Just a few inches of soil coverage made the difference between life and extinction.

Black’s description of the impact and its immediate aftermath are the highlight of the book, but not the bulk of the book. Despite the title, most of the book is the first days of the mammals (in an ecological sense rather than an origin sense). 

In that sense, the book has a problem: the best material is right up front, and the extended “what happened next” doesn’t have the same built-in drama. 

This is not to say the rest of the book is boring – far from it. I appreciated the personal last chapter, which Black draws parallels between the devastation of regrowth of, well, the planet, with her own personal journey.

But the book doesn’t stop with the last chapter. For the scientifically minded who want some of evidence behind Black’s descriptions, the endnotes for each chapter are little mines of information. 

My only quibbles are not about the fossils or rocks, where Black is as knowledgeable as anyone. There is a tiny passing comment about the low level sense of smell in birds, which is a common myth that I believed, too. I might not have caught it if it hadn’t been for listening to an interview about birds’ smelling ability. Black also refers to “the numbers game” a couple of times without explanation, and I don’t know if every reader will understand it’s a reference to a reproductive strategy (r selection: make a lot of low cost offspring with a high chance of dying).

And, putting on my graphic design hat for a moment, the cover is just so smart. I love it.

This is my favourite of Black’s books (so far). I know there will be more good stuff coming from her.

External links

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs publisher site

An Immense World reviewed

Dear Mr. Yong,

I wish to make a complaint.

Your book, An Immense World, covers ground with which I am well familiar. I teach the concept of Umwelt – the “sensory world” of animals – frequently in my university classes, and have made my own modest contributions to the field of sensory biology. That confession might lead you to think that my complaint is that I was not among one of the many researchers interviewed for your work, as you have clearly done substantial and thorough investigation of the material presented in this volume. Indeed, the interviews sprinkled liberally throughout the book are informative and often delightful. I assure you, sire, I have a clear-eyed understanding of my stature in the scientific community and I am not so vain as to think my trifling work on crustacean nociception warranted inclusion in this volume.

Indeed, this book is so close to my interests in teaching that one might suspect that my complaint is that I wished to write this book. But this is not the nature of my complaint, since I have many other works to complete already, and I surely could not have completed the task with your admirable skills. This work does not “scoop,” as we academics say, any current or aspiring projects of mine.

I enjoyed the book’s straightforward structure. Most chapters cover a single sensory system, replete with fascinating examples from many species, often interspersed with conversations from the scientists who discovered the abilities of these animals. What reader will not delight is the description of pyrophilic nettles that seek out distant first fires? Or that the skill of echolocation, perfected by bats, is one that humans can also learn? You have often said, Mr. Yong, that you “cover the ‘Wow’ beat” in your journalism, and this surely rings true here. Indeed: wow.

No, the reason for my displeasure is that you have written a book that is not only laudable and will surely be lauded, much as your previous work has been. I note with pleasure that it has already appeared on the bestseller lists of a prominent American newspaper of record. It is surely one of the most accessible and widely read introductions to the field of neuroethology as has ever been written.

And that, good sir, is the nature of my complaint. You have composed a veritable paean to neuroethology, and interviewed many members of the International Society for Neuroethology (of which I am, alas, not presently a member due to my current position asking that I be solely focused on instruction of students), yet nowhere in this estimable book does the word “neuroethology” appear.

This is a grave sin of omission. An Immense World is so clearly and delightfully written that it shall doubtless be read my many a curious and impressionable student, who might well wonder, “How might I, in my studies, eventually become a person who contributes to this field?” And such a wayward learner would have no guides, no indication at all that there is an entire discipline devoted to answering these and related questions, and that its name is neuroethology.

I realize that this is, to a degree, a parochial concern. Yet because this book is so good, and will no doubt be more widely read than many university textbooks on neuroscience or animal behaviour, that I cannot help but lament a missed opportunity to share the wonders of the academic discipline that has been my main scientific “home,” as it were, for many years.

Nevertheless,  this book has already inspired my to make sensory biology the focus of a seminar class that I am scheduled to teach this fall.  Further, I will recommend this book widely to any who might show an interest in zoology.

Yours in blogging, etc., etc.

P.S.—I confess to having no idea why I chose to author this review in the style of an open letter in the dense prose style favoured in Victorian England, other from it seemed apt.

External links

An Immense World publisher site

Is using AI to write a paper academic misconduct?

We’ve come a long way from ELIZA. Or the ridiculous duelling chatbots.

Natural language artificial intelligence has recently gotten far better than I think many people realize, and today’s article in Scientific American points that out.

A researcher asked an open source artificial intelligence program, GPT-3, to write an academic paper. It did such a good job that the preprint is out and the paper is now under review at a technical journal.

Publicity stunt? It smells a little like that, but then again, this is an area that needs some publicity.

As natural language program like  GPT-3 get more widely available and more widely known, of course university students are going to do what these researchers did. They are going to get the programs to write their papers.

How is that going to shape up in our thinking about teaching?

It using an artificial intelligence to write a term paper cheating? I suspect a lot of my colleagues would say, “Yes,” for the same reason that asking an actual person to write a paper for you is cheating.

But how would you detect that?

The new article suggests that these papers are not going to be obviously defective. If anything, the clue for a professor might be that the paper is too good.

Every one would be a unique output of the artificial intelligence, so that it might skirt plagiarism detectors. I don’t know enough about how GPT-3 generates text to know if it has a “tell”: predictable quirks in expression that might indicate it was an artificial intelligence rather than a person.

I don’t think many university professors are thinking at all about what this means for student assessment. We professors have traditionally wanted to build towards using writing as the preferred assessment. We ask grad students to write theses, after all. But writing as a form of assessment keeps getting compromised and harder to validate.

For another look at what GPT-3 can do, check out this video of someone who used it to recreate a childhood imaginary friend - which turned evil and tried to kill him.

Disclaimer: The story in the video is so wild that I can’t help but wonder if some of it is staged. 

Update, 2 December 2022: Veteran blogger Chad Orzel has a Substack post on this issue: “Why do we assign writing?”. The take-away is that if your writing assignment can be done by an artificial intelligence chatbot, you’re probably doing it wrong.

External links

We asked GPT-3 to write an academic paper about itself. Then we tried to get it published

Prediction: American creationists will try again to get evolution out of schools

On Friday, the United States Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, which was precedent for the nation-wide legal right to an abortion.

That sucks. 

I won’t pretend for an instant that I have anything particularly insightful to say about that particular case. But I do want to post something here about something this signals that are relevant to my own particular interests, namely science education.

It is clear that the US Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade because they could. Far right conservatives have been wanting this and threatening this for years. It was always clear that as soon as there was conservative majority on the court, Roe v. Wade would be under threat. And now it’s done.

There was not a reasoned legal decision. This was a partisan power play to give far right conservatives what they wanted.

There is every reason to think that far right conservatives are going send a host of cases going to the Supreme Court. Andy Kim reported hearing, “Let’s keep this going now” on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

Judge Clarence Thomas (who will not bury a hatchet) practically invited it when he laid out three cases that he thinks the court should revisit. They are all high on the conservative wish list to repeal and all concern people’s sex lives. (Which is, by the way, super creepy.)

But Edwards v. Aguillard has to on the far right conservative hit list. 

That’s the ruling that said it was unconstitutional to teach creationism (or “creation science” as it was called for a while) in science classes in US K-12 public schools because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. That said, “states can’t get promote one particular religion over the others.”

No, Edwards v. Aguillard hasn’t been mentioned by name by Thomas or others. I haven’t seen anyone else bring this up yet. But I would bet that creationists are already looking to line up court cases in hope of getting the issue on the docket of the Supreme Court. 

Given that Kitzmiller v. Dover never got to the national stage, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Discovery Institute or some other entity decided to make another run at making “intelligent design” legal in schoolrooms.

Creationism is important to the same far right, religious fundamentalist conservatives who have been spearheading the assault on Roe v. Wade. Mike the Mad Biologist has often written about “Nothing in movement conservatism makes sense except in the light of creationism.” (2012, 2019, to give a couple of examples.) My take is similar. The tactics used by creationists for decades were eventually adopted by the wider US conservative political machine as their default mode of operation.

The teaching of creationism will be come up, and soon, if the court continues the way it’s been acting.

This week, the national meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution has been happening and I’ve asked a couple of times if anyone is even talking about Edwards v. Aguillard. No answer yet. This makes me worry that my colleagues are going to be shocked and appalled if this goes to court and they lose, because they won’t have taken any action or prepared for such an eventuality.

This is small potatoes compare to the big ticket fantasies that conservatives have (i.e., terrorize people who are not white conservative Christian fundamentalists). An enormous amount of damage could be done well before the courts get to repealing a science education case.

But it’s not nothing, either. 

Attacks on education undercut the future you can even imagine, never mind the future you can build.

Edit: On reflection, it might not be creationism that goes up for a court challenge. It might be Engel v. Vitals, which ruled against prayer in schools. Or something else about Christianity (disguised as generic “religion”) in public schools. Because it’s one of their big bugbears. They know the power of public education in shaping culture and they want to influence it.

Update, 27 June 2022: Well, this morning’s ruling on Kennedy v. Bremerton School District seems relevant to this post. In particular, the Supreme Court rejects the so-called “Lemon test” that I have seen cited consistently in cases regarding the teaching of creationism.

This is getting out of my knowledge base very fast, but here is one early reaction:

(T)he Supreme Court effectively grants special, heightened First Amendment rights to religious speech, allowing public school teachers to pray on the job while denying most other public employees basic free speech rights.

And from David Shiffman:

I went to public school in a very blue part of a purple state.

As a Jew, I requested that our music class “holiday concert” include at least one song that’s not a Christmas song.

A Christian classmate threatened to murder me.

Today the Supreme Court sided with him, not me.

This seems to be a very clear move towards more religion in public schools. And that would include science classes.

Update 2, 27 June 2022: Something that puzzled me in the decision was verbiage that the Supreme Court had long ago abandoned the Lemon test or words to that effect. Steve Vladek disputes this.

As Leah notes, the conservative majority in Kennedy overrules SCOTUS’s major prior Establishment Clause precedent in Lemon, but tries to pretend that the Court had already overruled it in prior cases (spoiler alert: it hadn’t [Emphasis added.]). This is sketchy even if you think it's correct.

And other people seem to agree. This isn’t ye olde coute rulyngs, but the first time the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected the Lemon test. Tweets here and here, for instance.

End abstract sponsorship for the Neuroscience meeting

Tomorrow is the deadline to submit abstracts for the Neuroscience meeting (the biggest academic meeting in the world).

This meeting does something that I have never seen at any other meeting. Every presentation and poster needs a society member to “sponsor” the abstract. And a member can only sponsor one scientific and one “metascience” presentation.

“So just become a member.” Not that easy, because membership also requires you to be sponsored by two active existing members. So if you are in a smaller campus, there may be no existing member who can sponsor you.

If you are in a lab with three society members but want to present four posters, you’re stuck.

The problem is so obvious that the Society’s Twitter account has taken to trying to help people rustle up a member to sponsor abstracts by retweeting requests. Like this.

Desperate last minute request from a @UniLeiden postdoc! Would anybody mind sharing their @SfNtweets membership ID for me to be able to use as a sponsor? Much appreciated 🙃

Or this or this. Not to mention this and this.

This is a failure on a couple of levels. First, it’s a stressful waste of time for people who want to present at the meeting. Second, it’s clear that people are willing to sponsor presentations they had nothing to do with.

I suspect that this policy could also cause problems with around representation, which occur pretty much any time you create an obstacle that has anything to do with money.

And it shouldn’t be up to a social media account to try to fix a conference admission problem.

I can see three possible reasons for this policy – two okay and one bad.

1. Keeps out cranks, kooks, and quacks who want to present crackpot ideas. I think there are better ways of achieving this.
   
2. Limits the size of the meeting. Sorry, but that ship has sailed.
3. Drives membership. This is the bad reason. Look, either make membership worth having or increase the registration fee for non-members to compensate for lost revenue.
   

The meeting has done this for a long time. I ran into the problem the very first time I submitted an abstract. And that was, as they say, a while ago now. It feels like the kind of policy that sticks around because “We’ve always done it this way” instead of serving any valuable purpose.

It is time for the Society to publicly say why they limit submissions this way, or get rid of the policy altogether.

External links

Neuroscience call for abstracts

New podcast epiode for ABT Time

My newest podcast interview is the ABT Time podcast, episode 39, hosted by Randy Olson.

Randy has featured on the blog a few times before, so long time readers may recognize that “ABT” in ABT Time is an abbreviation for “And, but, therefore” – the key words for making a concise narrative.

The ABT structure features prominently in the Better Posters book because it is an powerful tool for encapsulating a project in a sentence. 

The podcast mostly talks about narrative and posters, but because I’ve crossed paths with Randy a few times, our chat is more conversational than formal interview.

The ABT Time podcast should be available wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify, YouTube, etc.).

External Links

ABT Time #39 on ABT Agenda

The big two oh blogiversary

Happy blogiversary to me!

Twenty (!) years ago, I started blogging for the first time, right here on this blog. I can’t even remember the first title, though it certainly wasn’t NeuroDojo. 

Blogging became a habit. Besides this blog, I still maintain two other blogs that are updated regularly, Marmorkrebs and Better Posters.

And while many once active blogs have slowed down – including my own – I would never consider shutting down all my blogs. It has been far too rewarding. (I mean, I finally got to write a book because of blogging!)

For this blog, NeuroDojo, I have been proud of the times little things broke out of the blog and impacted other arenas. I am pleased that a horrible, sexist paper originally published on paper and retracted finally got a retraction notice slapped on its online version. I’m pleased that a journal worked on guidelines for presenting statistics because of something I wrote. The word “kiloauthors” took on a little life of its own.

And I want to say that for me, blogging still occupies a space that is still unmatched by social media. The longer format helps me clarify my own thinking on things. And once I have a post down, it’s so much easier to go back and find what I have written, when someone revisits a question on social media that I wrote about back in the day.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for showing me the potential of the blog format.

Thanks to anyone who has stopped by to read anything here.

Photo by Kristine Hoepnner on Flickr.  Used under a Creative Commons license.

RIP Robin Overstreet

I learned yesterday that Dr. Robin Overstreet died.

Dr. Overstreet played a small but important part in my research. When I realized that things I was seeing in shrimp nerve cords were not staining artifacts but were alive, my colleague Brian Fredensborg contacted Dr. Overstreet. Robin generously keyed them out to the genus at least. Polypocephalus, a larval tapeworm.

I think the three papers I co-authored about that animal would have been much harder to sell to editors, reviewers, and readers, if we’d had to write something like, “Unidentified parasite A.”

I met Overstreet at a American Society for Parasitology meeting in San Antonio in 2017 in front of my poster. I was glad I was able to thank him for helping me, my student, and colleague. We talked a little about potential for more collaboration, but alas, it wasn’t to be.

New interview on Scholarly Communication podcast

I’m fortunate enough to be on the Scholarly Communication podcast with Daniel Shea! (I think it’s episode 91, but they don’t number them by default.)

While the ostensible reason I was on was to talk about the Better Posters book, the conversation ranged widely. Daniel and I talk about narrative, collaboration, and efficiency in the realm of academic communication more generally.

Here are a couple of posts I mention during the interview.

First, this is the post where I talk about my wariness anyone says, “We need to do a better job training Ph.Ds in...”.

Second, this is the post where I talk about how my writing class completely, totally, 💯 rejected the idea that storytelling has any place in science. So storytelling is dead, long live narrative.

You can listen at the New Book Networks website or probably any other place you get your podcasts (like Stitcher).

External links

Scholarly Communication podcast home

Scholarly Communication: Better Posters

This one is for Doctor Rubidium

This video of American woodcocks cropped up on Twitter, and Raychelle Burks asked for a mash-up with “Drop It Like It’s Hot. ” Who am I to argue?

Update, 15 May 2022: And here’s the second part of the request. Going back to 1969 with The Meters...

Newest podcast interview

I’m on the Lecture Breakers podcast this week!

I saw host Barbi Honeycutt on a YouTube video, and heard about her work with teaching in alternative formats besides lectures. I reached out to see if she was interested in chatting about using posters for teaching without realizing she had already a great blog post on the topic herself.

I had a blast talking with Dr. Honeycutt, and I hope the fun comes through on the show.

In preparing for the interview, I listened to a few episodes of the podcast, and I am now a regular listeners. If you are an educator, do yourself a favour and subscribe to this podcast. The enthusiasm is high, the questions are smart, and the guests are thoughtful educators. It’s a great listen for anyone teaching in higher education.

Related posts

Using poster assignments in courses

External links

Lecture Breakers #121

6 Ways to Use Teaching Posters in Your Course to Increase Student Engagement (2019)

The NSF GRFP problem, 2022 edition

I am not even in the US any more so should not care about this, but...

The National Science Foundation announced the 2,193 awardees of their Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards and yet again, some single institutions outperformed entire American states.

83 awards went to students from one institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

61 awards went to students in the entire University of Texas system.

This seems biased. But I don’t know what the applicant pool looks like because NSF don’t release that data.

I don’t have bandwidth to do more analysis, but check out the links before for some previous years.

Related posts

NSF GRFP award skew in 2021

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition

The NSF GRFP problem continues (2018)

Fewer shots, more diversity? (2016)

 

 

 

Sand crab podcasting

I’m on episode #56 of the Western Outdoor News podcast for a segment called “Sand crab 101”!

It was fun to reach back into my scientific roots and talk about one of the first species I got to do research with.

This is I’ve done a couple of podcasts I’ve done recently. I hope to do some more!

Ghoulish university administrators

In the last few years, Tressie McMillan Cottom has been persistently reminding academics that institutions won’t love you back.

Somewhere in maybe the last year, though, university administrators have moved somewhere from at least pretending to care, or perhaps indifference, to outright hostility.

Here’s just a couple of examples.

Rachel Anderson posted:

State of the world: raging pandemic with my university experiencing the highest case rates yet, and I’m teaching 5 days/week in person. My university’s email this morning: Have you considered including a gift to us in your will? We’d love to talk to you about estate planning.

Katie Kennedy posted:

I'm required to put a statement in my syllabus saying that if I die during the semester, the college has a replacement for me. It was written in first person--by the administration. It says I've been consulted in who my replacement will be. None of this is true.

It feels like administrators are not only expecting their faculty to die, but are busy looking for how to that into an opportunity. Silver linings and all that.

And let’s not forget that one institution all but wheeled out a coffin to teach a class.

And don’t get me started on the foot dragging and jumbled reactions on return to campus when many areas are experiencing the biggest number of cases and hospitalizations yet.

The tone deafness and failure to navigate these problems is just astonishing. All of these things are just eating away at trust.

Even if the current wave of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is the last major one in many places (which I doubt), things are not going back to normal in higher education soon. Too many cracks have been exposed. Too many cracks have already turned into breaks, and more are undoubtedly coming. The consequences of these sorts of bad leadership are going to continue for years.

Related posts

Classes taught by the dead and copyright

 

The predictability of “accelerated publication”

Academic publisher Taylor & Francis are offering a new service: “accelerated publication.” expedited review.

An example:

Publish in 3 – 5 weeks from submission

• Submission to acceptance: 2-3 weeks
  • 1-2 weeks for peer review
  • week for author revision
• Acceptance to online publication: 1-2 weeks, with proofs within 5 working days and 48 hours for author review
• Cost per article: $7000 / €6200 / £5500
  

Of that $7,000 (US dollars, presumably – hey everyone, currencies of many nations are called “dollars”), a small sliver of that goes to reviewers: “In recognition of the time constraints required of them, reviewers of Papers taking the 3-5 weeks option are paid an honorarium of $150.”

Of course, there are some people who will complain that 5 weeks to publication is still too long because there are a lot of academics with unreasonable expectations of how long peer review should take. 

So now we enter the cycle. 

Step 1: Academic publisher says something about journal operation that involves money.

Step 2: Academics complain. 

In this case, there’s good reason to complain. This scheme has issues. But I’m not  going to do a detailed analysis of problems with paying for “accelerated publication,” because other people are going to do it better.

Instead, I want to point out that this is a 💯 percent predictable outcome of the pressures on academics.

There are a lot of academics whose publishing strategy is, “Send it to someplace with high probability of acceptance and get it out anywhere as fast as possible.” Heck, I see questions on Quora almost daily: “What is a journal in [field] with high acceptance rates, fast publication, and no article processing charges?”

(I’m surprised they don’t ask for a pony, too.)

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the Taylor & Francis “accelerated publication” scheme looks like MDPI’s publishing model. I think both are being driven by the same forces.

I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that many of these academics prioritizing high acceptance and fast turnaround are not in G20 countries. This might explain why discussions of things like “accelerated publication” and MDPI on the Twitter community I’m in (G20, English speaking) are so negative, but publishers keep acting like there is high demand for this kind of publication.

If publishers are responding to demands from academics, we should be asking why customers want the things they want. Who are the authors who are freaking out so much over a few extra weeks in review and why?

Hat tip to Alejandro Montenegro on Twitter.

University tells scholars what journals to publish in

The latest news around the controversial publisher MDPI, from Katarina Sam on Twitter:

Our uni made official statement about publications in MDPI journals: Such papers will not be funded, supported, and considered as a valid scientific result. We were also recommended not to do any services for them.

From her Google Scholar page,  Katarina appears to be at the University of South Bohemia (which is an awesome name, incidentally). When I search for “University of South Bohemia MDPI,” I can’t find any official statement. The first page of hits is a list of MDPI articles where one or more authors have an affiliation with the University of South Bohemia. Searching the university website also returns no policy statement, but a few articles publihsed in MDPI journals.

I am interested in the policy statement because this seems to me to be very weird and very bad.

I was under the impression that the ability to choose which journals to publish in was part and parcel of academic freedom. Indeed, one of the arguments against open access mandates from funding agencies and others was that it compromised academic freedom. But I think people made a fuss there because such mandates meant they wouldn’t be able to publish in glamour mags like Nature and Science. 

Here, I am less sure people are going to make a fuss because a lot of people... dislike MDPI. 

I am very, very nervous about an institution trying to ban its faculty from using, not a single journal, but an entire publishing company.

I think MDPI will be outraged because the people in charge seem to have thin skins, but I don’t think they will be harmed much. MDPI clearly has authors who value their services.

I’m more concerned by the harm this precedent sets.

Update: Charles University has a vice-dean writing blog posts about MDPI. Not so much policy, but an expression of concern, I suppose.

But what’s the point of noting that MDPI is a “Chinese company (with a postal address in Basel, of course).” How is national origin relevant to the quality of an academic publisher? What is being implied here?

More edits: The National Publications Committee of Norway (they have one of those?) announced a new listing for dubious journals: “level X.” The article begins by singling out an MDPI journal that got added to the list.

I was about to tweet earlier today that “I wonder if the push against MDPI was because an institution was unhappy about paying open access fees.” And sure enough:

The phenomenon Røeggen refers to is open publishing with author payment. - Many are worried about the phenomenon. Not for open publishing, which I experience that there is great support for in Norwegian research, but the solution we have received in open publishing where the institutions have to pay when the authors publish, says Røeggen. ...

In recent years, the requirement for open publication, through national guidelines and the so-called Plan S, has created a significant shift. Now more and more money is being paid for publishing, instead of paying to be able to read the magazines.

Emphasis added. 

And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: It is weird to me that academics will bitch and moan about how long journal reviews take (“Careers are on the line here! People’s lives are put on hold because reviews take so long!”), but then consistent and prompt review is used as a reason to suspect a journal.

Questions have been asked about the rapid pace from submission of manuscripts to publication and that this is in line with research quality.

MDPI is not alone here, though. Frontiers publishing and more traditional publisher Taylor & Francis also have journals making the “level X” status. Norway is also avoiding the “carpet bombing” approach taken by the University of South Bohemia.

Still. This is not a great week for MDPI specifically and perhaps for open access more generally.

Related posts

The paradox of MDPI

My resolve not to shoot the hostage is tested

External links

The same week that the researchers' article was published, the journal ended up on the gray zone list (Automatic translation of Norwegian title; article in Norwegian, naturally)

PolicyViz interview

The real reason to write a book is to do interviews.

I’ve long noticed that I know the basic arguments of many books I’ve never read, because of the interviews authors gave arising from the book.

So I was very excited to talk about the Better Posters book with to Jon Schwabish (author of the excellent Better Data Visualizations, which I reviewed here) on the PolicyViz podcast. The episode is now available wherever you listen to podcasts!

Jon is a great person to talk to, and his questions got me thinking about some new topics that I hadn’t considered before.

This season, Jon has been experimenting with a video version of the podcast. I already knew of my bad speaking habits as an interviewer on audio (I go on tangents way to easily, I start sentences without knowing where they’ll land), but now I get to see entirely new bad habits (looking away from the camera, shifting my weight).

I mean seriously, why am I looking to my right so much? There’s nothing there...

If you are not interested in my voice or my face (and I can’t say I’d blame you), the show notes boast a complete transcript.

External links

PolicyViz podcast Episode #206: Zen Faulkes show notes 

UK eyes new crustacean legislation

The Guardian is reporting that there is the potential new animal welfare regulations that would affect decapod crustaceans and cephalopods. The London School of Economics, whose report is being used to justify the move, seems rather more confident than The Guardian and is basically saying this is a done deal and that it will happen.

I am a little concerned by the backstory here, particularly cased on this:

The study, conducted by experts from the London School of Economics (LSE) concluded there was “strong scientific evidence decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs are sentient”. ...

Zac Goldsmith, the animal welfare minister, said: “The UK has always led the way on animal welfare and our action plan for animal welfare goes even further by setting out our plans to bring in some of the strongest protections in the world for pets, livestock and wild animals.

“The animal welfare sentience bill provides a crucial assurance that animal wellbeing is rightly considered when developing new laws. The science is now clear that crustaceans and molluscs can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation.”

See, I want to know what Minister Goldsmith knows that I don’t. Because I follow scientific literature on this topic and the science on whether crustaceans “feel pain” is nowhere near as clear as Goldsmith claims. We are only barely getting a handle on whether crustaceans have nociceptors,

And “sentience”? Yeah, I don’t think there is a generally agree upon set of criteria for that, either.

A cursory glance at the London School of Economics report shows that none of the authors have stated experience in crustacean biology. (One studies cephalopod cognition.) A major review on this topic by Diggles (2018) is not included. Some of the references in the report are dated 2021, so leaving out a 2018 paper is a puzzling omission. 

But at first blush, this report looks more comprehensive than the documents used to argue for legislation in Switzerland. But I’ve only glanced at it so far, and will need some more time to read in detail.

References

Diggles BK. 2018. Review of some scientific issues related to crustacean welfare. ICES Journal of Marine Science: fsy058. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsy058

Related posts

Switzerland’s lobster laws are not paragons of science-based policy

External links

Boiling of live lobsters could be banned in UK under proposed legislation

Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans

Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law following LSE report findings

Do not make professors guess a student’s childhood

I was filling in recommendation forms for students today, and was gobsmacked by this question:

English Competency: For students whose first language is not English, please rank the applicant’s ability and comment on the applicant’s English competency in the box provided below.

Wow, that’s a bad question. Wait, let me upgrade that. That’s a freaking terrible question.

Why am I only asked to assess the English competency of students “whose first language is not English”? I know a lot of students who are native speakers whose linguistic skills are not good.

More to the point, how can I possibly know what a student’s first language is?

Maybe a student will mention this to me, but probably not. It’s not in a student’s records for a class. I am quite confident it is not part of a student’s university record.

(And this was a non-optional part of a form, which is also weird, because presumably I am supposed to skip it for native English speakers?)

The only way anyone could complete this part of the form is by making assumptions. So this question is code for:

“Does this student speak with an accent?”

“Does this student’s name look European?”

“Does this person have black or brown skin?”

The question singles out some people as needing extra “assessment”, but it’s based on the recommender’s stereotypes about who a “non native English speaker” is.

If you’re going to ask a question about language proficiency, ask, “Rate this applicant’s proficiency in communication” for every single applicant. Don’t even mention the language. Because there are some people who will never speak English who should be afforded the opportunity to have an education. (I’,m thinking of people who sign, for one.)

Update, 23 November 2021: In this case, a happy ending! The program changed the question so that every recommender is simply asked to comment on language skills for every applicant.

The University of Austin: Stop it, you’re just embarassing yourself.

 Spotted on Twitter this morning (hat tip to Michael Hendricks):

We got sick of complaining about how broken higher education is. So we decided to do something about it. Announcing a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth::

It offers no degrees. It has no accreditation. This is its physical location:

But they offer “Forbidden courses” where students can have “spirited discussions” about “provocative questions.”

Presumably for a tuition fee. Since this wouldn’t lead to any degree or course credits, not at all clear why would a student do this when they can just have an drunken argument in any bar with “provocative questions.”

Having been through the creation of a new university (in Texas, no less), I can say with confidence:

This is trash.

This is probably one of two things.

One possibility is that it’s a wild mix of huge egos and a cash grab. It will come to nothing besides  separating a few suckers from their money. It reminds me of a “university” created by a former US president that was sued and gave out a settlement of $25 million. 

Or maybe it’s a pure criminal operation. 

Everything about this stinks like the kind of stink that make you involuntarily gag and fight the urge to vomit.

Update: Sarah Jones reminds me:

I’m not convinced this experiment is going to last, but they seem to have money and as a general rule I think it’s wise to take the right as seriously as it takes itself.

This is true. Being badly wrong has not prevented many ideas from having amazing longevity.