Sam

whether you agree with Andrea or not, what he is doing is very important for a healthy scientific culture. Thank you @andrea-musacchio.bsky.social for setting a great example for all of us: Speak your mind even if it is against the mainstream flow.

The silence from the pro-LLPS crowd is deafening. As a (truly) unbiased observer, I for one am very curious to see the counterarguments, which surely must exist. The skeptics are having their day.

Uh-oh, our first #ScienceSky showdown in #ChemSky #BioChemistry
Can Bluesky be a place to sort scientific disagreements, a place to constructively air grievance and concern? We shall see. Fighting words start here:

I find this plugin very useful to have installed. Several times it has stopped me from citing a paper that I did not realize was retracted. Every scientist should use it!

On the left - western blot of B16F10 cells wt and KO for CDK8. Our in house produced antibodies give a lot of unspecific bands. On the right same probes with antibodies preincubated with fixed CDK8 KO cells - there is a specific band and faint unspecific bands, which can be probably eliminated with increase of amount of KO cells.

Neat trick if you polycolonal ab's suck. Incubate them with fixed cells with a KO of your protein of interest, then spin. Protocol here: www.med.upenn.edu/markslab/ass...
I was amazed how well it worked on first try (I'm sure that I can completely eliminate unspecific bands)
#WesternBlot #cellsky

Peer review has a weakness in that it is not in one's interest to upset colleagues by pointing out their mistakes, as upset peers may write negative reviews in the future. But setting the record straight is an essential part of science, and an ever-self-congratulating field is prone to get stuck.

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

📢 We’re a coalition of former staff members who saw too much, spoke up against a tyrant administrator and were pushed out.

Follow us and stay tuned to learn how this department has deteriorated over the last few years and how it’s recently getting worse & worse.

Except Frontiers & MDPI journals 🤣

👏

Thank you. In any case, Finnish research will benefit and everyone involved is to be applauded for taking this important step. Hopefully other countries will follow.

The SNSF is no longer funding Open Access articles in special issues Large increase, inconsistent processes: from February 2024, the SNSF will no longer fund Open Access articles in special issues.

Big news in the publishing landscape of 🇨🇭
The Swiss National Science Foundation will no longer support publications in special issues. This is to fight the unsustainable models pushed by publishing houses like MDPI or Frontiers. There is another way. Go Diamond! 💎💎💎💎💎💎💎
www.snf.ch/en/g2ICvujLD...

Changes to the classification

Big news from Finnish publication forum. Almost all MDPI and Frontiers journals will be downgraded to level 0 and thus are not considered as properly peer reviewed trustworthy scientific journals.
julkaisufoorumi.fi/en/news/chan...

Why keep 16 MPDI and 22 Frontiers journals at level 1? If the problem is the publisher rather than journal-by-journal then that decision doesn't make sense. Did any of the members of the committee making the decision publish in those remaining journals by any chance...

We don't need to use MDPI, Frontiers or other paper mills for that. There are lots of journals that publish negative results AND have a real peer review process, such as PloS ONE, Scientific Reports, Life Science Alliance, iScience etc.

It's now possible to win $1000 for making a PubPeer comment!🤑

Worrying 👇

Impossible😂 But why the hell submitting there??? Publishing in MDPI may be the best way to kill a PhD students career before it even started:

predatoryreports.org/news/f/list-...

t.co/1NaeJXfSwx

It's because every MDPI journal has to reject one manuscript, one time, so they can say they have a legitimate peer review process. Unfortunately you drew the short straw this time, but on the plus side the chances of it happening to you again are practically zero so just try another MDPI journal! 😉

Many years ago I was asked to join the editorial board of the journal Electrochem that was about to start.
It sounded very interesting, since OA was just coming in and we were trying to move away from elsevier and other subscription journals.
1/

Thank you for sharing. I have read many similar stories from people on Twitter/X in the past, so your experience is not unique

The paper mills helping China commit scientific fraud In one Chinese research paper into prostate cancer, 50 per cent of the patients named were women – who do not have prostate glands.

Academic fraud is rife with #china at the forefront. As I write in the Spectator, journals are waking up to reality of fake science thanks to dogged detective work of @elisabethbik.bsky.social
worthy winner of @einsteinberlin.bsky.social award #fraud #science

www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-...

More evidence (as if it was needed) that Frontiers and MDPI do not peer review properly, have predatory characteristics and should be avoided like the plague

An Atypical Mechanism of SUMOylation of Neurofibromin SecPH Domain Provides New Insights into SUMOylation Site Selection Neurofibromin (Nf1) is a giant multidomain protein encoded by the tumour-suppressor gene NF1. NF1 is mutated in a common genetic disease, neurofibroma…

Beware using FLAG tags in SUMOylation studies, as the lysines in the DYKDDDDK sequence can be SUMOylated according to this report... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Optimizing murine sample sizes for RNA-seq studies revealed from large-scale comparative analysis Determining the appropriate sample size (N) for comparative biological experiments is critical for obtaining reliable results. In order to determine the N, the usual approach is to perform a power cal...

This study finds that at least N=8-12 RNA-seq experiments are required to avoid a >50% false positive rate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Prevalence of errors in lab-made plasmids across the globe Plasmids are indispensable in life sciences research and therapeutics development. Currently, most labs custom-build their plasmids. As yet, no systematic data on the quality of lab-made plasmids exis...

Worth bearing in mind! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hello Bluesky, looking forward to interesting and stimulating science here!