Maybe these graphical abstracts could be a little less graphic

Currently blowing up my twitter feed are responses to two graphical abstracts in the Journal of Proteomics, both published a couple of years ago in 2012. (There is no statute of limitations on poor decisions.)

First, we have this abstract to the paper, “Harry Belafonte and the secret proteome of coconut milk”:

Here is your coconut woman, as perhaps envisioned by Harry Belafonte. For its proteome, though, have a look at the report inside!

Additional: Joshua Drew seems to have found the source of this image: a list of “sexiest bartenders” (#79) with source text removed.

Later that year, we have this abstract to the paper, “Assessment of the floral origin of honey via proteomic tools”:

Honey, sweet honey? Chestnut, acacia, sunflower, eucalyptus, orange, you name it. Just the same. Eat any of them, you will be savouring animal, not plant proteins!

Um. Er. I think the word “inappropriate” is overused, I can’t find a better one here. Those are inappropriate.

I went looking through the graphic abstracts in the journal since then. I saw no other examples of similar pictures with a quick skim.

There is a common denominator to both papers besides the style of the graphical abstracts. The author for correspondence on both is Pier Giorgio Righetti, who is on the journal’s editorial board (thanks to Ted Morrow for spotting that). Alfonsina D'Amato is also listed as an author on both paper, but that Righetti sits on the editorial board of the journal makes his involvement more noteable.

Rajini Rao reached out to Dr. Righetti about the first of these graphical abstracts, and got this response:

Hello Prof. Rao,

I wonder if you have been trained in the Vatican. As you claim to be a professor of Physiology, let me alert you that this image is physiology at its best!

Take care,
Prof. Dr. Pier Giorgio Righetti

Okay then. Filed under “dismissive.”

Bug G. Membracid, a.k.a. Bug Girl, quickly spotted that the image in the second paper was taken from this music website and modified:

Bug has emailed to see if permission was given to use this. Photographer Alex Wild noted that this might be the thing that lands the authors in trouble, if the photographer did not give permission for this image to be used. The musicians in the image might have less power than the photographer in this case.

This is clearly going to be an evolving story, so I expect to update this post a few times. For one, Hysell Oviedo has asked Elsevier representative Tom Reller for a response. He just tweeted:

We're addressing this right now.

Hat tip to several people who alerted me of these papers: Michael Hawkes, Hysell Oviedo, Karl Broman, and Jon Tennant. Apologies to those I missed who brought this to attention. (Update: It seems TOC ROFL Tumblr, Jillian Buriak, Jonathan Eisen played a lead in bringing this to attention.)

Additional: Amidst Science beat me to finding additional graphic abstracts from the Righetti lab. First, we have here (Journal of Proteomics again, “Cibacron Blue and proteomics: The mystery of the platoon missing in action”). (Update: Tom Reller says this one will also be removed.)

Yves Klein made it to the Olympus of modern artists with Cibacron Blue in his glamorous Blue Venus, whereas we scientists made a “blue fiasco”. Yet, redemption is sculptured inside!

Showing this wasn’t confined to one journal, we have Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Proteins and Proteomics, where Righetti is not editor (whether he was back in 2011 when this was published, I don’t know):

More additional: Tom Reller says the graphical abstracts are bring removed.

Even more additional: Righetti’s unconventional use of graphical abstracts is not limited to pictures of women. Journal of Proteomics, again, “Popeye strikes again: The deep proteome of spinach leaves”:

Popeye kept gulping down large amounts of spinaches to become the first iron-man of America, not knowing that spinach leaves would comprise not less than 322 proteins as listed therein.

At least this one has a guy.

Still at Journal of Proteomics, this baffling one, from “Cheek-to-cheek” urinary proteome profiling via combinatorial peptide ligand libraries: A novel, unexpected elution system”:

Perhaps the winner of the EuroKUP contest, as set up by A. Vlau in Athens (modern Olympic games?), but read the paper and cast your vote!

This one (from here, “Identification of olive (Olea europaea) seed and pulp proteins by nLC-MS/MS via combinatorial peptide ligand libraries”) is a benign image, but the caption is strange:

The sacred fruit to Athena here reveals its secret proteome: 61 proteins in the stone and 231 unique gene products in the pulp. Will this save Greece from default?

More weirdness in Journal of Proteomics, “Poppea's bath liquor: The secret proteome of she-donkey's milk”:

Two Buridan's asses between two hay stacks, unable to decide, died of starvation. She-donkeys are not so dumb, as their milk is nutritious, hypoallergenic, with cosmetic properties (ask Poppea).

And when you get to the paper, “Ginger Rogers? No, Ginger Ale and its invisible proteome,” the inevitable conclusion is that Righetti does not take graphical abstracts seriously.

Ginger Ale or Ginger Rogers? Even though we might be going against our findings reported inside, we confess that we much prefer the latter! Chapeau to her, in fact “Top Hat” to the fabulous duo Ginger and Fred.

Easy humour from a paper on vinegar:

Now, as you use vinegar as condiment for your tossed salad, you cannot ignore any longer its proteome!

Can you guess the topic of the paper featuring this graphical abstract? If you said, “recent progresses in the technique of combinatorial peptide ligand libraries,” you’re today’s lucky psychic!

A humble tribute to a literary genius. Mark Twain was involved in sounding the (shallow) waters of the Mississippi River, we in sounding the low-abundance proteome. The journey continues.

How about this one?

As the snake in the Visconti's family coat of arms gave birth to a soldier, so we resurrected its venom buried for a quarter of a century in polyacrylamide gels.

This one might fit the article, on the proteome of a drink:

A century ago the absinth, much beloved by French impressionists, was banned as a poison. Fear not! The Braulio aperitif will titillate your soft palate with its aroma-enhancing proteome.

This one actually seems like an interesting paper: about the analysis of a bible that may have been on the Silk Road. So this image, while kind of appropriate, is not scientifically helpful.

You do not have to break your back on a camel back on a two-year journey on the Silk Road to reach Khan Baliq and meet Khubilai Khan. Just read this wondrous story inside!

Yet more additional: The Journal of Proteomics editor, Juan Calvete, grabs a shovel and starts digging deeper.

Dear colleague,

Thanks for kindly letting me know that a graphical abstract published in Journal of Proteomics is getting unwelcome publicity. Although I, personally, so not think that the alluded images are sexist (as well as I would not consider it sexist if a man were represented), at least this was neither the intention of the authors nor of the editor, I cn (sic) agree that this kind of images may be inappropriate for illustrating a scientific paper, and consequently have asked our journal manager to remove them. If anyone has been offended, officially apologize for that, and I hope to give settle the case as soon as possible to devote to the lab which is what take take me up most of the day.

Best
Juan

If someone calls your images sexist, and you agree to take them down, you are not helping your case if you say, “But I didn’t think they were sexist.”

Still more additional: Cackle of Rad has a flowchart:

Many people seem to think the woman picture is wearing coconut-based clothing. No. She is holding two drinks contained in coconuts. This is a bit clearer in the original picture.

Additional keeps coming: Danielle Lee reacts.

Additional digging: The editor continues commenting on the Lab and Field blog.

More parody: Alex Wild picks up on Twitter’s redubbing of Journal of Proteomics:

Jeremy Yoder points to the Journal of Proteomics guidelines for graphical abstracts (my emphasis).

A Graphical abstract is mandatory for this journal. It should summarize the contents of the article in a concise, pictorial form designed to capture the attention of a wide readership online. Authors must provide images that clearly represent the work described in the article. 

These captured the attention of readers, all right.... but these didn’t even meet the journal’s own technical specifications. It asks for images that are at least 531 × 1328 pixels. None of the contentious images above come even close to 1,000 pixels in size.

Award-winning additional: Sarcastic F notes Righetti won a substantial award, the first Beckman Award, in 2012. Author Frantisek Svec specifically singles out the paper featured at the top of the post with the worst graphical abstract:

During his scientific career, he published over 750 papers, many of them with very catchy titles. For example, his recent papers in the Journal of Proteomics are entitled “Harry Belafonte and the secret of proteome in coconut milk” and “‘Cheek-to-cheek’ urinary proteome profiling via combinatorial peptide ligand libraries: A novel, unexpected elution system”. Wouldn’t you open a paper with such a title right away? No wonder that papers with these titles are widely referred and led to almost 20 000 citations.

You may now proceed to chew on how that sort of scientific clout affects the willingness of others to point out, “That may not be a good idea.”

Update, 24 March 2014: The three papers are now available on ScienceDirect again, minus the graphical abstracts. Dr. Righetti is no longer listed as being a member of the Journal of Proteomics editorial board.

External links

is Sexxing up your scientific journal OK? The Journal of Proteomics seems to think so
Your daily dose of sexism (again) and #ProteomicsSexism
Journal of Proteomics, what the...?!?!?!?!?
Reason #140 Why Sexist Bullshit in Academia is Not Okay
Not how I wanted to spend spring break
Journal of Proteomics Gets Weird
Sexism charge hits proteomic journal — and you’ll see why
This doesn’t belong in science. At all.
Not cool, professore.

Newspaper breaks secrecy around UTRGV’s presidential search

The Monitor is reporting on the names of four finalists for the position of the first president of University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (left to right):

• UTPA President Robert Nelsen.
• Georgia Regents University President Ricardo Azziz.
• Former University of Alabama President Guy Bailey.
• Former Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera.

I am not surprised that our current president, Robert Nelsen, is one of the finalists. I am surprised by the journalism on display, since the names of these individuals were secret until yesterday. And that secrecy is the main section of the story.

In a news release earlier this month, the UT System public affairs office explained the strategy — which was employed in recent presidential searches at UT Arlington, UT Health Science Center - Houston and UT MD Anderson — as a way to better attract top-tier talent.

"Names of candidates are kept confidential to attract the absolute highest quality of candidates," the release read. "Executive search firms advise that top candidates are reluctant to pursue a position without a promise of confidentiality, as it may jeopardize their current positions." ...

After UTPA President Robert Nelsen and his predecessor, Blandina "Bambi" Cárdenas, made open campus visits prior to their hirings, faculty members have become accustomed to meeting their leaders before their hiring.

“We’ve had all this emphasis on community involvement,” said Dora Saavedra, a member of the UTPA faculty senate. “It seems very odd that the inclusivity will be discontinued, or seems that it will be discontinued with the new university.” ...

(University of Texas Chancellor) Cigarroa contacted Sanchez on Monday, asking not to publish the names, as the UT System had promised to protect candidates’ identities and making them public could negatively impact the hiring. But the editor decided public interest in identifying the candidates — thus allowing a public vetting — trumped UT System’s desire to keep the process hushed.

External links

In search for inaugural UT-RGV president, 4 of 5 remaining candidates identified

Tuesday Crustie: Lobster tea party

The lobster totally distracted me from the hawk.

Things were different in 1938. Spotted at Retronaut thanks to Jarret Byrnes.

Rich people science

The New York Times has a long, important article about the influence of the rich on the conduct of science.

Here’s the pull quote:

“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.”

Among other things, the article links the somewhat surprising decision of the American government to create the BRAIN Initiative to the interests of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who created the Allen Institute out of his own personal interest in neuroscience. It also points out that there is a lot of interest by the super-rich in, wait for it, curing cancer and other diseases.

I can’t help but think about filmmaker Jim Cameron going to the deepest point in the ocean. Cameron was able to do it because he had a lot of money, so he went instead of working scientists. Are we moving back to a time when only the rich get to be scientists? I hope not.

A super quick reaction is that this is another reason why I think science crowdfunding is important. When lots of people can pool their resources to support research projects, it could be a democratizing counter to single rich people setting the research agenda.

External links

Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science
James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenge: a scientific milestone or rich guy’s junket?

Photo by Tony.L.Wong on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for first half of March 2014

Prof-like Substance ponders the sticky question of who decides when a lab should stop getting institutional support.

I make a cameo on DrugMonkey blog regarding the dual career couples in academia symposium I attended recently.

Tal Yarkoni looks at data sharing mandates, including the “taxpayers own data” argument that I discussed here.

Science babies

When I go to the movies, I sit to the very end. The last frame. I do this because I love love love it when filmmakers put little Easter eggs at the end of the credits, and because I love film music, and I just think, darnit, these people worked hard and someone should see their names on the big screen.

The last few years, something I’ve seen more of in the end credits of movies are “Production babies.” It’s the names of babies had by staffers during the production of the movie. Pixar pioneered the practice with Toy Story in 1995.

We should do this in scientific papers. Routinely. Put a mention of it in the acknowledgements section. Editors usually give authors a fair amount of freedom to thank whoever they want.

There’s a lot of talk and research about how families affect academic careers, especially scientific ones (“For men, having children is a career advantage. For women, it’s a career killer”). Listing “science babies” born during the making of a scientific paper might be a way to show in the research community that having children is not only normal, but worth celebrating.

External links

Pixar delivers, babies get credit

Invertebrate pain, and reporting on replications

“Does this invertebrate animal feel pain?” As Noah Gray noted, mass media seems to cover some version of this question about every six months or so.

This time, we have an article that appeared a few weeks ago from New Scientist. It’s just been picked up in The Washington Post and a Popular Science blog. The piece features the work of Robert Elwood, Robyn Crook (both of who have appeared on the blog before) and Hans Smid.

It’s an extremely good article that captures a lot of the nuances of the issue. I was surprised, though, to read this paragraph describing Elwood’s work:

(Elwood) started with prawns. After so many years of working with them, he thought he knew what to expect, which was that he would see nothing more than reflex reactions. But to his surprise, when he brushed acetic acid on their antennae, they began grooming the treated antennae with complex, prolonged movements of both front legs. What’s more, the grooming diminished when local anesthetic was applied beforehand.

Elwood is describing work he co-authored back in 2007 (Barr et al., 2007). What this fails to mention is that this effect could not be replicated in other species (Puri and Faulkes 2010). Elwood knows this; he’s mentioned the failure to replicate in his academic papers (Elwood 2011, page 177):

One recent study, however, failed to detect nociceptors in decapod crustaceans and also noted little ability to respond to noxious stimuli (Puri and Faulkes 2010) despite organized responses to noxious chemical and electrical stimuli noted in other studies (Barr et al. 2007; Elwood et al. 2009; Elwood and Appel 2009).

I’m curious as to whether this was mentioned during the interview, or was removed to get the article to the appropriate word count.

How should scientists, and reporters, discuss work that has failed to replicate? The original Barr and colleagues article remains in the scientific literature; failed replication alone is not grounds for retraction. In that sense, the paper by Barr and company has not been definitively shown to be flawed or wrong. But being able to replicate effects is an acid test (no pun intended) for determining if those effects are real and robust.

Reporters often go after quotes from outside experts; “scientists who were not involved in the study.” This is good practice, and represents due diligence on the part of the reporter to find potentially critical viewpoints. But these external experts are often working from their knowledge of the field, and are generating critiques from theory and first principles. It’s not common for them to have done any experiments.

If it’s good practice to get responses from other researcher making criticisms with no data, surely it’s even better practice to talk about criticisms that are backed up with data published in peer reviewed journals?

The paragraph I quoted above also does not mention an interpretive problem. “Grooming” is the behaviour that is used to indicate nociception and/or pain in the shrimp. Acid causes an increase in grooming. Local anesthetic applied after acid reduces grooming. So far, so good.

What would you predict if you applied anesthetic alone?

The anesthetic should not be noxious – it is supposed to reduce sensory input, after all – so you might predict to see no increase in grooming compared to control.

But applying anesthetic alone causes an increase in grooming (Figure 1 in Barr et al. 2007):

I don’t know what to make of this, except that it complicates the story. The shrimp are clearly detecting the anesthetic and responding to it in the same way as the noxious stimuli: increased grooming.

Additional: Author Tamar Stelling replied on Twitter:

Elwood clear. Still: prolonged groom. @ 3 diff. decapod subject to 3 diff. treatm. Might-not-feel-pain component already obvious.

And:

Right, it’s more complicated than story can show. Chose to focus on evidence of Elwood’s total research, not one experiment.

I disagree with Stelling’s characterization of this being “one experiment.” The entire first paper by Barr and colleagues hinges on the notion that that acids and bases cause crustaceans to groom, and that is indicative of nociception.

Stelling’s answers point out the tension between a good narrative and scientific processes. For a journalistic narrative, uncertainty is uncertainty. There are no need for different gradations of uncertainty. The author of a study going, “It could be something else,” outside experts saying, “ don’t think so,” and sitting down and actually running the entire experiment again and not getting it to work all serve the same purpose in the narrative: saying, “maybe not.”

Scientifically, those forms of uncertainty are not at all equivalent.

Additional, 18 March 2014: Bio News Texas also reports on Crook and Elwood’s work. The article is apparently inspired by, but not a duplicate, of the New Scientist article.

Additional, 25 March 2014: Mike Taylor runs with this, and suggests new kinds of citations.

References

Barr S, Laming PR, Dick JTA, Elwood RW. 2007. Nociception or pain in a decapod crustacean? Animal Behaviour 75: 745-751. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.07.004
Elwood RW. 2011. Pain and suffering in invertebrates? ILAR Journal 52: 175-184. http://dels-old.nas.edu/ilar_n/ilarjournal/52_2/html/v5202Elwood_abstract.html
Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS One 5: e10244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Related posts

What we know and don’t know about crustacean pain
Crustacean pain is still a complicated issue, despite the headlines
Squished squid, or: noci-ceph-tion
Tenth International Congress for Neuroethology, Day 5

External links

Don invertebrates feel pain?
Do lobsters and other invertebrates feel pain? New research has some answers.
Squids and other invertebrates can probably feel pain

Photo by Twistiti on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Tuesday Crustie: “Your kung fu is weak!”

“Now I will show you the power of my ultimate technique!”

Hat tip to Dapper Dan Hart for pointing to this link.

Lots of science in Ethics Bowl 2014

Ethics Bowl is a university competition at regional an national levels intended to get undergraduate students (mainly philosophy majors) to discuss ethical issues. I’ve helped with the preparation of teams from my university in the past.

One of my colleagues, Cynthia Jones, helped draft cases this year (available online here). One case involved a topic I suggested to her: “de-extinction,” which I’d seen via a TEDx symposium devoted to the topic, of which Carl Zimmer was one of the speakers.  And it was used as one of the cases in the finals of the competition. The case read thus:

Gone today, here tomorrow

In Jurassic Park-like fashion, scientists have been attempting to bring recently-extincted species back from the dead, so to speak. The 5 April 2013 journal Science reported that the first live product of de-extinction, a Pyrenean ibex, lasted only a few minutes before extincting again. The ibex, which was produced by a process similar to that used for Dolly, the infamous cloned sheep, was driven to extinction in the first place with the help of humans. Some scientists think it only fitting that humans play a part in the de-extinction of those species that we helped to extinct in the first place.

An environmental argument for de-extinction arises from the case of the wooly mammoth, a species whose de-extinction would likely have beneficial consequences, such as the restoration of a more diverse ecology in the Arctic. Unfortunately for dinosaur enthusiasts, species of dinosaurs are not contenders for de-extinction at the moment, as the processes for de-extinction that are currently available require “fresher” DNA. And some notable environmental scientists are concerned about the unforeseen effects of reintroducing a de-extincted species into an environment, much like the unforeseen effects of introducing non-native species of plants or animals into novel environments. One might also wonder whether de-extincted creatures fall under endangered species laws and whether it is appropriate to use the term ‘extinct’ for species from this time forward, given that de-extinction is an imminent possibility.

Speaking of de-extinction, The Current radio show recently had a very good look at the passenger pigeon, which went extinct one hundred years ago this year. It is probably one of the better candidates for trying the technique.

Browsing the fifteen cases used at the national Ethics Bowl competition is interesting because of how many revolve around scientific and technologial issues.

• Case #1 is called “Open Exce$$ Publishing,” and involves open access scientific publishing.
• Case #3 is about Google Glass.
• Case #4 is about drones.
• Case #14 is about honeybee colony collapse and pesticides.

University of Montana won the national Ethics Bowl championship this year, beating the University of Oklahoma in the final round.


External links

De-Extinction in National Geographic

The sixth fan: missed it by that much

In the past few weeks on my other social media sites, I’ve been asking for help in getting UTPA into the finals of the Sixth Fan competition. Up for grabs was $100,000 in scholarship money. Given that we serve one of the poorest areas in the country, I reckoned we could put that scholarship money to better use than most universities.

We made it past the first round, then the elite eight, and into the final four. We started the final four with only 10% of the vote, but we managed to reduce the spread to only a few percentage points by yesterday.

I voted a lot, but it was not enough. We are not in the finals. Alas. But we came close. And given than we were against a university with much more “name” recognition (Brighman Young University), we were competitive.

As Maxwell Smart said...

Who owns data?

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in the online science community about the data-sharing policies of PLOS journals, including PLOS ONE. I’ll link to DrugMonkey’s discussion here, as it was one of the first comments, and has one of the liveliest comment threads.

One reason this is contentious is because different scientists have different answers to the question, “Who owns research data?”

One view is that data is the property of the individual researchers, who, as owners, are allowed to use data in whatever way they see fit. (Whether students or lab leaders have greater claim to that data is another issue I’ll put aside for now.)

Others tend to view data as being in the public domain. Research, the argument goes, is paid for by government funding agencies, and taxpayers should have free and unfettered access to anything generated by tax dollars. (That not all is tax supported is another issue I’ll put aside for now.)

For many researchers, both of these views are wrong.

I checked my university’s Handbook of Operating Procedures on intellectual property. It clearly states that research data are considered intellectual property, and that we follow University of Texas System rules about intellectual property (“plain English” version here), which includes research data (section 3). And those rules are crystal clear:

I do not own research data I generate. Neither do the funding agencies.

The University of Texas system Board of Regents (right) own research data I generate.

Things get muddier because “scholarly works” – presumably journal article and books and papers – are owned by the authors.

While the Regents own the data in principle, it seems individual researchers are left to their own devices in practice. I doubt that the Regents care about how researchers choose to share data (or not), unless... it becomes possible to make money from data sets. It’s quite clear that the main aim of this policy is to allow the UT System to profit financially from inventions and patents. If there is money to be made from university research, the UT System wants to be one of the ones making it.

The University of Texas System is not small potatoes, but I have no idea if similar policies exist in other institutions. I’d be interested to hear from people in the comments about their university’s intellectual property rules.

Additional, 10 March 2014: PLOS has clarified its policy.

External links

PLOS’ New Data Policy: Public Access to Data
Data Access for the Open Access Literature: PLOS’s Data Policy
Update on PLOS data policy

Flip-flopping on tenure for UTRGV

When the new Texas university was announced, which we now know will be University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the first thing I remember our Dean saying was something along the lines of, “Faculty will keep their jobs.”

Today, the University of Texas at Brownsville student paper is reporting that may not be the case.

Bobbette Morgan... asked lawyers at the UT System “if tenure at UTB and UTPA means tenure at UT-RGV” and was told “no.” ...

“Legally, that is a true statement, but the intention here is to grow the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley into one of the larger universities,” Cigarroa said.

I myself am not worried about me, personally. My department is short of faculty as it is. But it is disconcerting to say the least to have heard one thing a little over a year ago, and another now. I think this question and concern is more relevant to University of Texas at Brownsville, where there have been multiple legal cases of the institution trying to dismiss tenured faculty.

Additional, 9 April 2014: In an email to faculty, advisor Julio Leon wrote (my emphasis):

In the coming weeks we will share specific processes for how UTB and UTPA tenured and tenure-track faculty may choose to transition to faculty positions at UTRGV. 

This implies that this will not be an automatic process.

External links


A question of tenure

Comments for second half of February 2014

Retraction Watch discusses why you should teach students about retractions.

Tara Smith talks about the culture shock of being a rural student in a university where students have money. Lots of it.

Dual careers in science

I spent a good chunk of today in a symposium about dual career hiring in academia. While the problem tuns throughout all of higher education, the focus was on STEM. I live tweeted as many talks as I could attend before I had to run off to class.

Our president said he was going to support dual hires, though the shape of this isn’t clear yet. But when you have buy-in from administration at the top, it makes things a lot easier. I hope that when be become a new university, we will be able to build in dual hire policies from the ground floor.

In conversation over lunch, I asked one speaker about whether state laws would prevent dual hires. She said no, because most nepotism laws had been struck down for being discriminatory against women. This interested me, given how often our search committee had been instructed to consider someone’s ability to do the job, and only their work related abilities, for legal reasons. There is clearly much more room to maneuver on these matters than I thought, and I’ve been done a lot of search committees.

I thank Biochembelle profusely, who took it upon herself to Storify my tweets:

External links

UTPA Advance Symposium home page
Stanford report on dual career hiring practices

In the hands of editors now

Since Christmas Eve (i.e., two months and change), I have submitted into the hands of editors:

Three data-driven manuscripts.

Two book chapters.

One commentary / opinion piece a journal commissioned me to do. This last one was just submitted today. It was due at the end of the month, so I officially got it in early.

That’s pretty good, right? Right? At least, it will be if a decent number of those get accepted. (Imposter syndrome nipping at my heels.)

And I have one more article that is due any second now. Fortunately, my co-author on that one has bought us a little more time already.

These are seven reasons why blogging here has been a little slow of late.

Tuesday Crustie: Sunbathing

A crab in the Bahamas, looking relaxed.

Photo by Danielle Maingot; hat tip to NOAA Ocean Explorer.

The Royal Society creates another Zune journal

This is repetitive. Another week, another academic publisher, another “me too” Zune journal. The latest to imitate PLOS ONE is the Royal Society, which announced it is launching Royal Society Open Science.

Let’s count the similarities to PLOS ONE, shall we?

• Supported by article fees. To their credit, however, there will be no fees for the first year. Honestly, I might submit an article while it’s free, but probably not after that. Why pay a fee more than ten times the cost of PeerJ?
• Does not review for “impact.”
• Article level metrics.

Innovations? Maybe that there is an option for open peer review. But it’s not clear what that will look like, so it’s hard to tell.

Like Science Advances, Royal Society Open Science will also “accept articles referred from other Royal Society journals.” Nice, but you do not need a new journal specifically to do that. As I noted before, it’s not clear what advantage having an article “referred” to this journal has versus taking my article to another non-Royal Society journal. Plus, why not accept articles referred from a lot of other journals besides Royal Society journals?

I just don’t see the point of this journal. I just don’t get what this journal is supposed to do for me that a ream of existing journals don’t already for me.

Unless you read very carefully, this news article from Science makes it seem like this is the Society’s first foray into open access publishing, but it is not. They already have Open Biology, running since 2011. It is still free to publish in Open Biology, even after more than two full years of publication. This might suggest that this “selective” new journal is not attracting the number of articles that it would like to.

I also note that, unlike Science, Royal Society journals have had the option of authors paying a (hefty) fee to make article open access for a while now.

I’m also puzzled by Steve Harnad’s pokes against the “gold” model of open access. We are just nowhere near enough institutions creating repositories for authors to self-archive to do the job. Maybe it will evolve towards that, but I don’t think that model is ready yet.

Perhaps the take home message from these new open access journals is this:

The creation of PLOS ONE was a landmark in the history of early twenty-first scientific publishing. Look at how many publishers have taken the PLOS ONE model, and run with it, and added no real innovations. Love it or hate it, you cannot ignore PLOS ONE. It changed the landscape of scientific publishing – and I would say for the better – more than anything else I can think of since the millenium.

Related posts

Zune journals
AAAS creates another Zune journal

External links

World’s first scientific publisher launches new open access journal
Royal Society Joins Open-Access Bandwagon

Tuesday Crustie: Explorer

Like its namesake, this cute little Columbus crab crossed an ocean. It made it all the way from the Western Atlantic to England. which was surely an epic voyage!

Hat tip to Oceana and Miss Mola Mola.

External links

Columbus crab crosses the Atlantic – big picture

AAAS creates another Zune journal

I am heartened that Science’s publisher, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) actually is listening to critics. This article notes that AAAS “has long been a target of complaints from some advocates of open-access publishing.” I wrote that Science magazine was a prime target to become an open access journal a little over two years ago. I don’t pretend my little blog post had much impact, but maybe Michael Eisen posting of a bunch of Mars Curiosity rover papers that had been paywalled by Science did have an effect. It made news.

Unfortunately, that has not happened. Instead of doing what open access advocates have, well, advocated – making Science the world’s first glamour mag to go open access – AAAS is creating Science Advances. This is, as far as I can see, another Zune journal: a “me too” journal with no apparent innovations.

Responding to criticism by creating something that nobody asked for is maybe not the strongest public relation move.

Let’s look at the rationale for creating yet another journal rather than improving the ones we have.

Science and AAAS’s other journals have been forced to turn away many high-quality papers, without providing an alternative publication venue.

But there already are alternative publication venues. There are many other journals by other publishers, including scientific societies. What advantage is there to authors in having this new journal? Maybe this:

Papers submitted to Science or its sister journals, Science Translational Medicine and Science Signaling, that are rejected can be automatically considered for Science Advances without more reviews.

You don’t need a new journal to do this; you just need cooperation between existing journals. Some neuroscience journals do this: check the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.

If there are positive reviews from Science, will acceptance be (almost) automatic in Science Advances? If the editorial board and review process is independent of Science, it may not be automatic, and authors may have to have to face another round of reviews, probably by different people. If that’s the case, there is no obvious advantage to authors to have this AAAS journal compared to another open access journal.

Another question is whether Science Advances will be review papers for intangibles like “impact,” “novelty,” and “importance.” If Science Advances simply goes for technical soundness, like PLOS ONE, many authors may want to pull their paper from the Science Advances submission queue to try their hand at an established disciplinary journal. An existing disciplinary journal will probably have a stronger brand than an untried Zune journal, regardless of the publisher.

Science Advances is a distraction from the real issues. I wish publishers would stop trying to give us what we don’t want. I would rather they just address the question of why it’s so difficult for their journals, like Science, to have their original technical articles to be open access.

Additional, 19 February 2014: Nature reports that Science Advances will screen articles for “import,” not just technical soundness. That seems to me that it is competing in a very most crowded niche in scientific publishing. There are a lot of journals that know that won’t reach into the realm of Science, Nature, and Cell, but strive to be the first line for papers that don’t make it there.

Related posts

Occupy Science (the journal)
How expensive is that glamour mag?
Zune journals

External links

AAAS Launches Open-Access Journal
Science follows Nature and starts a second-tier open access journal
AAAS announces open-access journal

Comments for first half of February 2014

The Scholarly Kitchen looks at journals published by scientific societies. It paints a slightly lopsided picture of costs of publishing in other journals.

I indulge in post necromancy over at DrugMonkey’s blog over anonymity in science. Sometimes, I do change my mind.

LSU Icthyology presents a proposal for a scientist’s influence score. Maybe we can do better than Klout or PeerIndex.

How is DeNovo doing?

One year ago, I predicted the new journal DeNovo would never have a second issue.

You may recall that the journal published a single article in its first issue, one by Melba Ketchum, claiming to have found evidence for new hominins in North America. That it, sasquatch DNA. Many people charged that the creation of DeNovo was a pure “vanity press” move by Ketchum to publish her research. Ketchum denied this. But there is little doubt she have a very, very steep uphill climb to get the paper in any regular scientific journal.

I cannot say that DeNovo is a dead website. The look of the website has changed since I last checked it, so someone is minding the store. The appearance is still fairly dreadful, though, with lots of crummy, pixelated images in the banner.

As for the scientific content, not only has there never been a second issue, there has never been a second article. It’s things like this that give new journals, and new publication models, like open access publishing, a bad name.

Tuesday Crustie: Diamonds

Valentine’s Day is approaching, and many may be thinking about jewelry. Nature has its own jewels...

Stunning!

This photograph by Daniel Stoupin uses no photoshop fiddling. It’s just taken with the right lens, a polarized lens in this case.

I happen to employ polarized light often in my photography. And not to cut reflections, but to find interesting patterns in different animals. In fact, most of my images in the old microscope gallery are made using polarized light microscopy technique that happens to emphasize muscles and other regular structures. After reading a lot about vision systems in invertebrates ...

(A) recent paper attracted my attention:

Cohen  JH, Putts MR. Polarotaxis and scototaxis in the supratidal amphipod Platorchestia platensis. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 199(8) 1-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00359-013-0825-7

The authors studied polarization vision in one amphipod species and gave evidence that it uses it for navigation. This work made me remember that some amphipods look very spectacular in polarized light, mostly from photos posted in photomicrography.net community. I decided to catch a few random amphipods (not of the same species) and make focus stacks under high magnification with crossed polarizers. I was amazed, to say the least! These guys are fabulous and all these patterns are absolutely invisible to our eyes.

There are more stunning photos in the original post. Go check it out.

Hat tip to Ziya Tong and Lindsay Waldrop.

External links

Polarized light vision and marine crustaceans

Deep freeze leech, or: the ultimate brain freeze

Recently, I spotted this graph on one of my social media platforms:

For those not familiar with the kelvin scale, 100 kelvin is -173°C. But soon after I saw this, I read a paper that is going to require a slight modification to this graph:

Meet the animal that forced the rewrite: Ozobranchus jantseanus.

This is a leech that lives on Japanese turtles. Some turtles can spend most of the winter under ice, so they get very cold, which in turn means anything on them will also get very cold. Cold is a problem for animals, for reasons you can see in this video:


The can is actually a good model for why freezing is bad for organisms. Water is weird: it expands when it freezes. If you think of the can as being like a cell, freezing causes all sorts of damage. Some species are able to tolerate freezing temperatures with biological antifreezes and other tricks.

But very fee are able to take it to the extreme of the leech above.

Suzuki and colleagues (2014) tested seven different species leeches, and froze then at -90°C.

Six of those species died. Ozobranchus jantseanus lived. Not only that, they could survive being frozen at -90°C for almost a year. And they could be frozen and thow out again up to five times before suffering any mortality.

Not content, Suzuki and colleagues decided to up the ante. They dropped these animals into liquid nitrogen, and left them there for 24 hours. All of them (tried with five individuals) revived when they were thawed back up, and lived over a month. Now, the animals that were frozen were not entirely normal. They couldn’t stretch the way they could before hand, but they were most definitely alive, moving under their own power.

This stunned me, and I thought for sure that this must be a record holder. But it turns out that there are a few other species that can take extreme temperatures, with the coldest being the larva of a fly (Polypedilum vanderplanki) that can survive a stunning -270°C. It does this by drying itself out completely, virtually becoming a living rock (“vitrifcation”).

How the leeches are doing this is not worked out at all in this paper. It must be some standing feature of the animal, because they are essentially flash frozen. There is not time for any sort of physiological or cellular response to kick in from a reaction to the cooling.

This is a very cool result (pun intended). One of the research groups that must be excited about this are the people interested in exobiology and the prospects of life on other planets. If something can survive these sorts of extremes, it significantly stretches the possible environments in which we might find life.

And this post gives me an excuse to feature one of my favourite movie musical numbers in years, this show stopper from Frozen:


Reference

Suzuki D, Miyamoto T, Kikawada T, Watanabe M, Suzuki T, Uemura M. 2014. A leech capable of surviving exposure to extremely low temperatures. PLoS ONE 9(1): e86807. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0086807.t001

The Zen of Presentations, part 65: Narrative templates for scientific presentations

People love templates. They can be great time-savers. But in the context of presentations, people often think of templates for PowerPoint slides, which are often overly busy and not well designed. Instead of using templates for slide design, try using a template for the script of your talk.

In Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking (reviewed here), Dorie Barton is quoted as saying, “Dude, it’ all the same story.” At SICB last month, Barton’s co-author, Randy Olson, elaborated. He talked about how a scientific paper can, in very broad strokes, follow Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey.” A key component of the monomyth is that there is an “ordinary world” (on top in the figure below) and a “special world” (on the bottom of the figure below).

The ordinary world is what is routine and familiar (think Kansas, Tatooine, the Shire); the special world is unknown, exciting, but also exhausting and dangerous (think Oz, the Death Star, Mordor). Olson pointed out that a scientific paper always starts off with the boring, mundane, and the known (Introduction). It may be the reason the first sentences of scientific papers are notoriously bland and general.

The paper then ventures into the unknown (Methods and Results), the new territory that the researchers are hoping to uncover. They then take what they learn, and bring it back to the ordinary world that they started in (Discussion).

Another strong structure for presentations is the “worm” presentation structure discussed by Nancy Duarte in her book Resonate (it’s now available in a free online version here; reviewed here).

The core of a presentation structure, according to Duarte, is the contrast between “what is” and “what could be.” Again, scientific research often has the core of Duarte’s “worm” presentation structure built into it .

The “what is” is our background knowledge. The “what could be” is typically our hypotheses and predictions (click to enlarge).

As I said recently:

(T)here is an inherent connection between stories and experimental science: they are both about causes. A satisfying story is built around causal connections.

Good presentations can be analyzed in many different ways. For instance, the Gettysburg address follows both Randy Olson’s “And, but, therefore” template (analysis here), and Nancy Duarte’s “what is / what could be” presentation structure (analysis here).

Related posts

Storytelling is dead, long live narrative
Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking review
The Zen of Presentations, Part 35: Another presentation book you must own

External links

Joseph Campbell was right. (Frodo, Harry, and Luke prove it.)

Tuesday Crustie: Fanboy

This hermit crab, who lives in the Seattle Aquarium and goes by the name Marshawn Pinch (who has a near namesake), might just be feeling a little smug this week.

Hat tip to John Breech and CBS Sports.

Comments for second half of January, 2014

Eager Eyes asks about the value of peer review. The robots aren't ready for it yet, alas.

I co-signed an open letter to Nature from Tenure, She Wrote concerning the poor behaviour of one of their editors, Henry Gee.

Michael Kruas has published in PLOS ONE and talks about his experience, and why he might or might not do it again.

No more As all around

A few years ago, I wrote about Denis Rancourt, a professor who gave every student in his class an A. I listened to an interview with him, and he did it because he didn’t like how pursuit of grades interfered with the intrinsic satisfaction of learning.

He was fired, and even though he had tenure, and that decision has been upheld by an arbitrator.

By all accounts, though, he did much more than just give a highly skewed distribution of grades. He liked breaking rules generally, and admitted as much. It’s possible that factored into his firing.

Related posts

Everybody gets an A

External links

Arbitrator Upholds U. of Ottawa’s Firing of ‘Dissident’ Professor
The Current: March 18, 2009

Photo from here. 

Storytelling is dead, long live narrative

At the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting earlier this month, Randy Olson said, “The word ‘storytelling’ is damaged.”

Coincidentally enough, this was something that had been drilled home to me when I gave an exam just a couple of weeks earlier in a technical writing class. I gave students an article that appeared in Nature Methods by Krzywinski and Cairo (2013)  arguing in favour of storytelling, and a response from Katz (2013) against it. There were other follow-up articles, but I just used the initial two to make it easier to complete an essay within exam time.

I asked the students to evaluate the two articles, and take a position on whether scientists should tell stories.

I was stunned by the students’ essays. Every single one of them said scientists should not use storytelling techniques. I’d done these sorts of “Two opinions, which do you agree with and why” sorts of exams before, but I had never seen such a completely lopsided response.

A couple of phrases got used in multiple essays. One was some variation of, “Storytelling is okay for kid’s books, but not for science.” Another was, “Science is supposed to be about the facts.”

This is perfectly in line with Olson’s plenary, in which he noted scientists suffer from “storyphobia.”

Scientists are afraid of the word “story", because of connotations of fabrication and “tweaking” of facts. These aren’t the same.

He advised people to avoid using “storytelling” and talk about “narrative” instead.

Because it was a final exam, I didn’t have a chance to follow up with the students about this. If I had, I would have asked them this:

If science is purely and solely about “the facts,” why do we publish scientific papers at all? Why not just upload methods and datasets? If you have the data and the methods to generate them, isn’t that all you need to assess the “facts” in play?

The other point that I would have raised with them is that there is an inherent connection between stories and experimental science: they are both about causes. A satisfying story is built around causal connections. Without those causal connections, you have a series of disconnected events that makes about as much sense as a random inkblot. Having a character win just because she got lucky makes for an unsatisfying story, because there is no explanation for luck: it just happens. From here (my emphasis):

21. My Porn Director Name Will Be “Therefore Butts”

Click here and get schooled by the South Park guys. The key thing they’re getting across with this is that scenes and events in storytelling don’t happen independently of one another. There must exist a chain of cause and effect, of action and opposite reaction, of consequence. Dominoes do not fall separate from one another. They fall against one another. Embroider that profound shit on a throw pillow.

Cause is the great beating heart of any story... and experiments. The whole point of an experiment is to determine if one thing causes another. Thus, any time you have done experimental science, you have a thread that might be woven into a stor—oops, I mean narrative.

This isn’t to say that non-experimental science can’t generate a narrative, but experimental science has an inherent advantage in doing so.

Additional: Some nice commentary on Google Plus.

References

Krzywinski M, Cairo A. 2013. Points of view: Storytelling. Nature Methods 10: 687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2571

Katz Y. 2013. Against storytelling of scientific results. Nature Methods 10: 1045.http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2699

Tuesday Crustie: Lavender

I’ve featured many colour variants of fished crustaceans on Tuesday Crustie, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite like this. It’s quite spectacular. It’s now on display in a seafood shop, where, given the age of big crabs, it might live for many years.

Hat tip to Miss Mola Mola and Judith Price!


External links

Seamen in Hokkaido shocked to discover bright lavender crab
Picture from here.

Just me: blogging under my name

I see at Denim and Tweed that Hope Jahren has started a project to collect stories from scientists who blog under their real names. I talked about this at the Identity session at Science Online last year. Luckily, this one was recorded, I start at 8:40 in. I have transcribed my comments (lightly edited) below.

I’m Doctor Zen, and I have the advantage that a lot of people think that’s a pseudonym. But it isn’t. It is my real name, and I have always worked under my real name from the beginning, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

One of which is that I’ve been blogging for a long time. When I started blogging, I don’t think there were any examples or models of pseudonymous bloggers. So it never occurred to me that I would do anything other than be me, for whatever that means.

And, also, I had this idea of what I wanted to achieve as an academic, as a scientist, which – and this sounds incredibly pretentious – was to be a public intellectual. To be somebody that was going to bring ideas and be visible and be noticed. For me, that was kind of the point of being a professor.

Now I realize having said that, that I have advantages. I’m a guy. I’m a white guy, as it happens to be. And now, I have even more advantages, ‘cause I’m a tenured white guy. I’m the person, you know... Now I’ve sort of taken it upon myself to try to use that more, and some of you have heard the kilt story: I wear the kilt as a reminder to myself to be fearless. And that’s always been my point and why I’ve continued, and I’ve never had any desire to take on a pseudonym (that you know of) because I’ve always felt, to use another superhero metaphor, that Sci saw on her blog, to use the Ghost Rider: “You can’t live in fear.”

(But it’s easier for me to not live in fear.)

Additional: Shortly asfter I posted this, Doctor Becca wrote:

Seriously, white dudes. You do not need to explain why you don't use a pseudonym.

And:

I am just annoyed by the slew of “why I blog under my real name” posts.

I hadn’t realize when I wrote this that there were more posts today both at Hope Jahren’s group post some of which were crossposted on individual blogs, like Small Pond Science.

Sorry that I was vain enough to highlight my own comments. I hope anyone interested in this topic will view the video I linked to above, which contains much more good discussion.

Related posts

Using advantages
Science Online 2013: Days 3 and 4

External links

On blogging under my Real Name
Why I write with my own name
#scio13ID We are who we are? Who are we? Issues of identity and the internet
On identity: #Scio13
Group Post: Real-Life Identity and The Internet
DNLee: Real-Life Identity and The Internet
Karen James: Real-Life Identity and The Internet

Minute Physics tries their hand at biology, and flubs it

This is an odd video from Minute Physics.


First, they say that “evolution” is misused, and just means, “change” in anything, not just biological species. This is extremely odd, and I don’t know what purpose they are trying to serve making this claim. The horse is out of the barn on the use of the “evolution,” with no qualifiers, to mean “biological evolution.” Both the general public and working scientists use the word that way. Geologists and cosmologists don’t get all in a snoot that the Society for the Study of Evolution too their word and should be called the Society for the Study of Biological Evolution, just to be clear. Ditto the Society’s journal, called Evolution

Trying to say “evolution” just means “change” in this day and age is a little like trying to assert that “gay” just means “happy.” “Evolution ain't goin' back to mean “change” in general.

Second, they claim that when people talk about “evolution,” they really mean, “natural selection.” No, they don’t. Biological evolution is not synonymous with natural selection. Natural selection is the main mechanism driving biological evolution, but it isn't the only one. There’s drift, there’s neutral theory, there are environmentally driven mass extinctions, there’s epigenetics, and so on.

Minute Physics should stick to physics.

Tuesday Crustie: The predator

This wonderful pic is just a teaser of a great series of pictures that Sara Mynott has done over at Saltwater Science. She describes of how crabs try to make a meal of a limpet, which is a tough job. And you have to love a post that includes phrases like, “top-squeezing oddballs.”

Hat tip to Alexis Rudd.

External links

Making A Meal Of Things: How Crabs Handle Lunch

Get charter

January has been a crazy month, what with the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting, manuscripts due, the start of classes, a public talk at the World Birding Center this past weekend, and much more.

Just a quick post to note that I have seen, and am not surprised by, a recent story that charter schools are teaching creationism.

Another Responsive Ed section claims that evolution cannot be tested, something biologists have been doing for decades. It misinforms students by claiming, “How can scientists do experiments on something that takes millions of years to accomplish? It’s impossible.”

The curriculum tells students that a “lack of transitional fossils” is a “problem for evolutionists who hold a view of uninterrupted evolution over long periods of time.”

I suspect it will take someone to launch a legal challenge to get these schools to knock that off. And the school will lose in court, as creationists always have.

Additional: Texas Freedom Network reports on the response from the Responsive Ed charter school, which mostly boils down to, “Yes, that’s right.”

Cook begins his defense by arguing that Responsive Ed’s instructional materials on evolution are simply conforming to the Texas curriculum standards by “examining all sides of scientific evidence” of scientific explanations.

This was a concern about the phrase “all sides of scientific evidence” when the standards were drafted, and I was hoping that the addition of the word “scientific” would squash such attempts. But then, creationists have a very unusual perspective of scientific evidence.

The Texas Education Agency is investigating.

Additional: And this story is starting to gain traction ntionally, as an LA Times article shows:

One way to react to a school system that places “supernatural intervention” on the same scientific plane as a natural process, however dopily described, is with relief that these 17,000 children won’t be equipped to compete in the real world with our kids. Life in modern America is hard enough, so there’s something Darwinian indeed about saddling all those kids with the burden of a 16th-century education.

Indeed, I think Richard Dawkins noted that those who oppose teaching selection in the classroom as wasteful and unlikely to produce anything often want to apply it with tremendous zeal in the social arena.

And this is why Texas struggles to become a tech leader. This is the image the state has: as anti-intellectual and regressive on the teaching of science.

External links

Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism
Texas’ possibly unconstitutional biology lessons now happen in charter schools
Texas Creationists Demonstrate the Real Reason Behind the Support For Charter Schools
Texas Charter School Operator Defends Misleading Its Students with Junk Science, Political Propaganda
Texas Education Agency Looking at Troubling Charter School Curriculum

Comments for first half of January 2014

Small Pond Science discusses tenure denial, with a story about recommendation letters that is both fascinating and terrifying.

Tuesday Crustie: Ye olde towne

I particularly like the “USA” in red, white, and blue.

Hat tip to Sleestak on Twitter.

Flat funding

This morning, I got a survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education about flat research funding.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is working on an article about how cuts in federal support for scientific research are affecting university labs. We are asking principal investigators like you to tell us if budget pressures have influenced the kinds of research you do, how your lab is staffed, and how you advise young scientists.

Actually, there are no questions about that last one in the survey I got. This is interesting, because I think it’s critical. There is this big drumbeat from people not in science (politicians, administrators) to get people into STEM degrees, but we don’t necessarily know what scientists tell students.

Here’s what I wrote in the freeform section in reply to the question, “Please describe any specific problems or challenges that have stemmed from flat or declining financing for research.”

I’ve been criticized for saying that I have not had serious problems from flat or declining funding.

Flat and declining funding has not affected me because I have never had much funding. I have been largely overlooked by funding agencies. I realized years ago that if I was to have a productive scholarly career, I was going to have to find ways to produce papers without grants.

Consequently, the research I do is cheap, and my lab can run on minimal funding. I’ve also successfully experimented with crowdfunding.

Some other researchers have been critical when I say things like this, because they see it as undermining the cause for federal research funding. This is like worrying about the blood loss from a mosquito bite in a patient with gunshot wound through major arteries.

The survey is anonymous, but I’m not one to lose a few paragraphs of potential blog material. ;)

Photo by James Jordan on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for second half of December 2013

Here are posts that I though were talking about in the last two weeks.

Dr. Isis’s blog is wonderful, and she’s looking for help describing how wonderful.

John Tainer asks if open access publishing is bad ResearchGate. It isn’t, although there are legitimate concerns about archiving, which I’ve addressed before (here, here).