Cofactor Ltd

Excited to share our @chemrxiv.org preprint on metabolically active living materials #MALMs with physciochemical biocontainment🧵

Why do we need #MALMs?

Because as @economist.com posits additive manufacturing is potentially a better way to make drinks and drugs

We argue #MALMs are the key for it

We just published a new paper in Science Advances, where we uncover how #Candida albicans reprograms the metabolism of oral epithelial cells during infection.

As first and corresponding author, I’m excited to share what we found — and why it matters.

#Skytorial #Immunometabolism #MedMycoSky

We asked two microbiologists, Antonella Colque and Nurdana Orynbek, to test a selection of AI tools built for scientific publishing and research. The goal? To see how well these tools perform in real research tasks. Here is what worked for them.
And what did not : buff.ly/rm3775c

Additive Manufacturing of Metabolically Active Living Materials with Physicochemical Biocontainment @chemrxiv.org
#ELMs #livingmaterials #MALM
chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....

Yes, it can happen here!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can'...

📚 #BookSky #bookreading

A cover image of book ‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong

Happy New Year 2026 🥳 🎆 🎊

Thank you all for following along here, and may all of us stay curious about the world around us!

Starting off 2026 with @edyong209.bsky.social ‘s brilliant book, #animmenseworld, beautifully explaining the concept of #Umwelt 🇩🇪: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

Academic journals' AI policies fail to curb the surge in AI-assisted academic writing The rapid integration of generative AI into academic writing has prompted widespread policy responses from journals and publishers. However, the effectiveness of these policies remains unclear. Here, ...

Yup, despite policies, many won't disclose AI use because they feel it might somehow count against them.

Also, policies without consequences are typically ignored.

www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.06705

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

1/ Want to try your hand at science communication but don’t know where to start?

We put together seven tried and tested tips for communicating preprinted research with suggestions and resources that can help you on social media and beyond! #SciComm

🔗 buff.ly/1jesQg5

Enabling options for review: from training and transparency to author-centered AI tools - openRxiv Peer review is widely viewed as a critical aspect of biomedical communication. Ideally, it provides authors with feedback so they can improve manuscripts and gives readers, particularly nonspecialists...

Excited to launch an openRxiv partnership with the scientist-run AI review service qed (@qedscience.bsky.social), the brainchild of @odedrechavi.bsky.social 1/n

openrxiv.org/enabling-rev...

Surprise, it took this long: In a bid to stem the tsunami of AI-written papers, arXiv’s CS just changed its submission policy, requiring that all articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete a successful peer review. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

Pleased to share our latest #AEM publication showing that #yeast Rhodotorula toruloides’ sense and response mechanism for nitrogen can be deployed for exopolysaccharide #biopolymer production (h/t @asm.org). A brief thread 🧵

Illustration credit: Dr. Stefania Vaga (h/t @cofactor.bsky.social)

Want to better understand the growing anti-science and anti-public health movement? These books can help! 2025 promises to be a tough year for the fight against disinformation, anti-science, anti-vaccine and anti-public health. Thankfully, American physicians and scientists have published books that can h...

2025 will be a tough year for the fight against disinformation, anti-science, anti-vaccine and anti-public health

These books can help prepare us

communities.springernature.com/posts/want-t...

Here’s our starter pack for cohort based training for researchers and PhD students. Includes CDT’s, DTP’s, DTC’s and other cohort based networks and clusters.
Please suggest others to add.
go.bsky.app/FMNKtv6

I have a PhD but don't meet all the requirements for this job. What do I do? - PostGradual: The PhD Careers Blog ‘How many of the criteria do I need to meet to be considered for a job?’ It’s a question that never goes away. It’s a particular bugbear for researchers looking to move into sectors beyond academia, a...

*NEW PhD CAREERS BLOG POST* What to do when you don't meet some of the job 'requirements?'

I've devised an approach inspired by baking (humour me...) to see how you can substitute out ‘ingredients’ (requirements) for others that do a similar job.

phd-careers.co.uk/2025/01/13/i...

Being a PI is just one of many things you can do with your PhD.

And doing *any* of those things is a successful outcome of your training and graduate school time.

The fact that a school or lab produces more of one of those things doesn't make it better.

🔋 Recharge Your Energy: Recovering from ADHD Burnout Feeling drained and overwhelmed? ADHD burnout can be challenging, but with the right strategies, you can regain your energy and thrive! Here’s how?

adhdwisdomtools.substack.com/p/recharge-y...

Who’s quitting academia? Data reveal gender gaps in surprising fields Even in scientific areas in which women are well represented, they are up to 40% more likely than men to leave research within 20 years.

Gender gaps in academia: even in fields with gender parity (in number), women are 40% more likely to leave research within 20 years.
#GenderGap #WomenInScience #AcademicInequality #WomenInResearch #AcademicCareers
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Joanne Cohn and the email list that led to arXiv A strong sense of community led an early-career string theorist to share preprints in a scientifically competitive environment.

'Before there was arXiv, there was Joanne Cohn (...) She started an informal exchange of string theory manuscripts that eventually became the arXiv preprint server, which has since revolutionized the way scientists share ideas and announce findings.'

pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

This is an important history, and it ends on a note of optimism, but I remain convinced that the most important element of effective resistance to AI in scholarly literature is consistent and perceptive peer review.

Facebook to ditch fact-checking: what do researchers think? Meta’s planned shift away from third party fact-checking in favour of a crowdsourced approach has perplexed those who study the spread of misinformation.

Meta’s planned shift away from third party fact-checking in favour of a crowdsourced approach has perplexed those who study the spread of misinformation.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Point of View: An annotated introductory reading list for neurodiversity A collaboratively developed annotated reading list expands upon core themes in neurodiversity, aiming to enhance understanding and to promote rigorous, destigmatizing, and inclusive practices in resea...

Understanding neurodiversity can be complex. This annotated reading list, developed by a neurodiverse team, addresses key themes such as lived experience, anti-ableism, and inclusive research practices.
elifesciences.org/articles/102...

Preprints often make news. Many people don’t know what they are The public needs context about unreviewed manuscripts, survey suggests

Yes it's important people understand a preprint hasn't been peer-reviewed. BUT it's also important to understand that what "peer-reviewed" means varies considerably, in some cases signifying nothing... www.science.org/content/arti...

Take a look at our new fellowship opportunity with Lancaster University, closing 19th January: daphnejackson.org/fellowship/l...

UK #AcademicSky: does anyone have experience of (academic) coaching, or a coach they'd recommend? I can access some funding for this but feeling a bit overwhelmed. Especially keen to hear from neurodivergent folk, or people who've had coaching for burnout and/or perfectionism.

✨A starter pack of professional #editors providing #scientific #editing services to #researchers, #publishers, and #writers 🧪✍️📝📚
#AcademicPublishing #ScholarlyPublishing #AcademicSky #Academia #SciComm #ScholComm #OpenAccess #research #science #PhD #proofreading #amediting #grantwriting #publishing

🦋 A starter pack of scholarly organizations supporting #research and #science 🔬🧪🧬 🧫 🔭

#AcademicSky #Academia #AcademicChatter #Academics #AcademicWriting #AcademicPublishing #ScienceWriting #SciWri #SciencePublishing #PeerReview #SciComm #ScholComm #SciSky #MedSky #BlueSky #OpenScience #PhDSky #PhD

Btw - this is another case where my frequent point that not just IF but also PubMed/PMC are obstacles to innovation applies: if a journal does a novel form of post-hoc change that doesn't fit in PubMed's rigid framework, it's not registered (so is disincentivized)

NextGen Voices: 2025 and 2050, in haiku

#NextGenSci gave young scientists this prompt: Write a pair of haiku. In the first, describe academia or your field in 2025; in the second, describe your predictions for 2050.

Read a selection of the responses: scim.ag/3Wa7gw9

Climate and Health Award: Advancing climate mitigation solutions with health co-benefits in low- and middle-income countries - Grant Funding| Wellcome This funding call will generate a body of evidence on the health effects of climate change mitigation interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Looking for climate and health research funding?

We're funding teams to investigate how climate mitigation solutions affect health in low- and middle-income countries.

🗓️ Pre-applications due: 18 February 2025

Learn more ⤵️
wellcome.org/grant-fundin...