Sam

📢 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 🤣

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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.
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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!