Girish Kale

Join us next week for the second Eastern VGZT of the season! 🤩

🗓️ Wednesday, December 10th
⏰ 9:00 UTC / 9:00 GMT / 10:00 CET / 14:30 IST / 18:00 JST / 20:00 AEDT

Our speakers are:
👉 Guojun Sheng
👉 Jennifer Zenker

See you there! ✨

Reminder: Tomorrow is VGZT day! 🚀

Don’t miss great talks from
👉 Luca Braccioli (@bracciolilab.bsky.social)
👉 Komal Makwana (on X: @Komal_Makwana4)

This is a great program to support postdocs during the transition to group leader position. I know from first-hand experience :)

The 2023 PI fellows outside The Company of Biologists' office in Histon, Cambridge, UK. From left to right: Leah Greenspan, Loic Fort, Priti Agarwal (front), Thomas Juan (back), Clotilde Cadart, James Gahan, Yuchuan Miao and Polina Kameneva. Originally posted on the Node (https://thenode.biologists.com/sharing-is-caring-developments-pathway-to-independence-programme/news/).

Learn more about why this programme was started in 2022, and some of the PI fellows we have supported so far, in this #biologists100 Perspective article by Reviews Editor, @ingridtsang.bsky.social:
doi.org/10.1242/dev....

Come join us in beautiful Roscoff for this Conference Jacques Monod on Developmental regulation: from molecular to ecological niches
May 18-22, 2026 Roscoff, France
Abstract deadline: January 31, 2026
Apply here: cjm.sb-roscoff.fr/en

Fintastic webinar series is expanding! Do follow for more great gastrula gossip 🥚

Cover image of Journal of Cell Science showing two cells expressing RFFL–EGFP and labelled for mitochondria and lipid droplets.

Why choose JCS?
- FREE to publish (OA options available)
- Fast-track option for papers with reports
- Preprint friendly, format-free submission + scoop protection
- Published by a not-for-profit publisher
- A tree planted for every peer-reviewed article🌳

journals.biologists.com/jcs/pages/re...

Tomorrow is VGZT day! 🚀

Don’t miss the great talks from
👉 Allison Kann (@apkann.bsky.social)
👉 Joana da Silva (on X: @joanamsilva14)

Join us for next week’s exciting VGZT session! 🎉

🗓️ Thursday, November 20th
⏰ 9:30 PST / 12:30 EST / 17:30 UTC / 17:30 GMT / 18:30 CET

Our speakers are
👉 Allison Kann (@apkann.bsky.social)
👉 Joana da Silva (on X: @joanamsilva14)

See you there 👋

1/ I’m very excited to share my postdoc work with @kseskv.bsky.social, in collaboration with @oligriffith.bsky.social. We explore embryonic DNA methylation reprogramming in the fat-tailed dunnart, an Australian marsupial 🦘🌏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our next #DevPres webinar focusses on regeneration with talks from Stephanie Tsai and Ben Cox @beeeencox.bsky.social.

📆Wed 19 November
🕓16:00 GMT/UTC

For more info and to register: thenode.biologists.com/development-...

We are excited to announce the first Eastern ☀️VGZT session for this season!✨🎉

📅Tomorrow, November 12th
⏰ 9:00 UTC / 9:00 GMT / 10:00 CET / 14:30 IST / 18:00 JST / 20:00 AEDT

Our speakers are:
👉Sameer Thukral (on X: @SameerThukral6)
👉Axel Newton (on X: @AxelHNewton)

See you on tomorrow☕️👋

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/...

Thanks to the @biologists.bsky.social's #theForestOfBiologists, this article also comes with a Small-leaved lime (Tilia cordata) tree in the Young People’s Forest at Mead in Derbyshire :)

Single-nucleus multiome ATAC and RNA sequencing reveals the molecular basis of thermal acclimation in Drosophila melanogaster embryos Embryogenesis is remarkably robust to temperature variability, yet the homeostatic mechanisms that offset thermal effects during early development remain poorly understood. We measured how acclimation...

The perspective is on the preprint O'Leary et al., 2025.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In preprints: multiomics of low temperature acclimation in the era of intensifying temperature fluctuations In a warming world, all life forms – endotherms and ectotherms alike – are finding their homeostasis being challenged. The environmental change is challenging at all stages of life. How different orga...

Thanks @amjeve.bsky.social for the invitation to write this perspective in the 'In Preprints' series in @dev-journal.bsky.social .

What's the downside of acclimation to low temperature? Turns out you will perform worse in heat shock.
doi.org/10.1242/dev....

We are excited to announce the second Western VGZT of Season 7!

🗓️Thursday, October 16th
⏰9:30 PDT / 12:30 EDT / 16:30 UTC / 17:30 BST / 18:30 CET

Our speakers:
👉 Hidenobu Miyazawa (on X: @HidenobuAnzo)
👉 Girish Kale (@girishkalephd.bsky.social)

See you next week! 👋

Join the VGZT session next Thursday, with a seminar also from yours truly :)

Early career group leaders We appoint researchers from across biology and biomedicine to set up their first groups at the Crick.

The @crick.ac.uk is recruiting Early Career Group Leaders

- Lab set-up, research costs, salaries for up to 5 researchers
- Support for up to 12 years
- Access to our core facilities
- Competitive salary
- Fantastic colleagues
- All areas of biology

Deadline 27 Nov

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Research engineer in Bioimage Analysis for the researchers of the inIdEx FORMULA Hi all We are looking for a bioimage analysis to work in an image analysis core facility in beautiful Paris. Can I ask you to share this opportunity with your networks? The position is in the Instit...

Job alert!

We are looking for a bioimage analysis to work in an image analysis core facility in beautiful Paris. Can I ask you to share this opportunity with your networks?

See also on the forum:
forum.image.sc/t/research-e...

VGZT Season 7 - Nomination Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks (VGZT) is an opportunity to share your science with an engaged, international audience of developmental biologists. Running from October 2025 to July 2026, this online ...

Dear VGZT enthusiasts,
Do you—or someone in your lab—work on exciting developmental biology research? Showcase it at VGZT, a global online seminar series connecting developmental biologists across all career stages. Apply here: www.tinyurl.com/VGZT-Nomination

FlyBase Update – October 2025 The termination of the NIH/NHGRI FlyBase grant has placed the long-term sustainability of FlyBase at risk. However, thanks to the generous support of several key individuals and institutions, we are pleased to announce that FlyBase will remain operational through the coming year. We extend our deepest gratitude to Yukiko Yamashita, Cassandra Extavour, Hugo Bellen, Thom Kaufman, the Genetics Society of America / Drosophila Board, the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, an anonymous donor and the Wellcome Trust. We are especially thankful for a generous gift from Seemay Chou, Jed McCaleb, and The Navigation Fund. We also greatly appreciate the continued support from the broader Drosophila community – your donations and service fees have been vital in helping us stay afloat. Special thanks also go to Jessica Manning for her tireless administrative work at Harvard, to Ruth Lehmann, Hugo Bellen, and Paul Sternberg for advice and efforts, and to the Board of the European Drosophila Society for all their efforts. Sadly, we must also share that several long-standing FlyBase team members have recently moved on. We are immensely grateful to Susan Russo-Gelbart, Lynn Crosby, Gil dos Santos, Kris Broll, Victoria Jenkins, and TyAnna Lovato for their many years of dedicated service and contributions to FlyBase. Looking ahead, ensuring FlyBase’s sustainability beyond the next year – and successfully integrating with the Alliance – will require new funding sources. We kindly ask for your continued support: • European labs: Please consider contributing to the Cambridge, U.K. FlyBase group • U.S. and other non-European labs: Please consider contributing to the U.S. FlyBase groups • Both U.K. and U.S. FlyBase are working diligently to establish an invoicing system. We appreciate your continued patience. For more information on how to support us, please visit: Contribute to FlyBase wiki page https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...
We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us.
#FlyBase #Drosophila

Oh yes, been waiting for this to drop since seeing ur seminar in @vgzt2021.bsky.social

We are excited to announce the first Western VGZT of Season 7! 🎉

🗓️ Thursday, October 2nd
⏰ 9:30 PDT / 12:30 EDT / 16:30 UTC / 17:30 BST / 18:30 CET

Our speakers:

👉 Antonia Weberling (@a-weberling.bsky.social)

👉 Sanjay Narayanaswamy (@sanjay-n.bsky.social)

We are all super happy and proud to see our work on the function and evolution of the #cephalic #furrow published in @nature.com. Let me say a few things about the background and history of this work on the #Evolution_of_Morphogenesis (1/12)

Tissue 'tectonic' collision is detrimental, but flies found two distinct solutions! Gratifying and grateful to be included in this collective effort, w/ Steffen Lemke, to crack the (or 'a') code of #cephalicfurrow, now out in @nature.com, all with @paveltomancak.bsky.social at the helm. (1/9)

🚨 New call for preLighters!🚨

Help us highlight the most exciting biological #preprints. Share your insights, build your profile, and be part of a supportive community! 🌍

Interested? Apply today & help shape the future of science publishing! 📢

More info: prelights.biologists.com/news/join-th...

Dear Fly Community, In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled. The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC). Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options. To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum). To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase Our immediate goals are: 1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online 2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance). Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data. At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise. Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028. We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide. Sincerely, The FlyBase Team

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

July in preprints - the CellBio edition - preLights Related posts

July in preprints, the CellBio edition, is out now on the preLights website.

Thanks to Girish Kale, Matthew Davies, Barbora Knotkova and Sristilekha Nath for their contributions.

Have a look:

prelights.biologists.com/prelists/jul...

#PrePrints #Publishing #Biology #Research #CellBio #PreLights

FlyBase needs your help! We ask that European labs continue to contribute to Cambridge, UK FlyBase, whereas US and other non-European labs can contribute to US FlyBase. For more information and how to donate: wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...