Richard Sever

Further details of our withdrawal processes are here. TLDR: you can label a paper 'withdrawn' but it remains accessible precisely because it will have been downloaded and traces remain online elsewhere, so a transparent record of what happened is needed connect.biorxiv.org/news/2023/08...

Journal silently removes paper for plagiarism, author claims identity theft If a plagiarized paper by an author who claims he didn’t write it disappears from a journal’s website with no notice, did it ever exist in the first place? It’s not just a philosophical question fo…

"If a plagiarized paper by an author who claims he didn’t write it disappears from a journal’s website with no notice, did it ever exist?"

Yes - it'll have been downloaded, search engines will've indexed it. This is why bioRxiv/medRxiv do not disappear papers.

retractionwatch.com/2026/02/05/j...

That is tragic. But the articles and complaints referenced are not about that: they are about the snow being dirty, getting in people's way, etc. It is the temperature not the after effects of the snowstorm that is killing people.

Meanwhile I remember 2016 under De Blasio when they didn’t get the ploughs out in time…

Maybe - but two weeks of sub-zero temperatures plus polar vortex is unusual after snowfall. And look how other cities grind to a halt under 1”.

Rightwing critics blame Mamdani as New York snow fails to melt Murdoch tabloid leads charge as big freeze persists – could the mayor please do something about the weather?

This New Yorker is not blaming the mayor for physics www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“No we can’t ‘just do [X]’. It’s more complicated than that”

Controversial Danish vaccine research group faces new allegations Researchers say they couldn’t find complete data for 10 trials that together enrolled tens of thousands of children in Guinea-Bissau

Have I ever mentioned how surreal it is to be an Editor-in-Chief of a journal called Vaccine right now?

www.science.org/content/arti...

It’s pretty wild, at least by typical academic journal editorial office standards.

Exciting preprint from the @merz.bsky.social lab proposing how fidelity of membrane fusion is achieved #membranes #trafficking

Characterization of zebrafish mutants with defects in embryonic hematopoiesis ABSTRACT. As part of a large scale chemical mutagenesis screen of the zebrafish (Danio rerio) genome, we have identified 33 mutants with defects in hematopoiesis. Complementation analysis placed 32 of...

7️⃣ chablis, frascati, merlot, retsina, riesling, cabernet, grenache, chardonnay, chianti, pinotage, sauternes, weißherbst, zinfandel. A set of zebrafish mutants with defects in embryonic hematopoiesis.

journals.biologists.com/dev/article-...

We should certainly consider whether how much should go into a paper (too much these days), whether some things should even be a paper (not the human genome), and the importance attached to them over other outputs. But I'm not sure the "livestream from my lab" is something anyone really wants 2/2

It's appealing in some respects, but I just don't see that's how traditional academic careers operate or syntheses of most ideas/conclusions. You can clearly have continual data generation but that doesn't mean the narratives should not be more discrete. Plus it's not really how citation works. 1/2

Linking the narrative with data, code, methods, and context is something everyone wants to see, but at some point most people most of the time want to draw a line under a project, mark it complete and move on. Will that change? 2/2

Back to the (Article of the) Future: An interview with Sami Benchekroun and Rod Cookson - The Scholarly Kitchen In this interview with Alice Meadows, Sami Benchekroun (Morressier/Molecular Connections) and Rod Cookson (The Royal Society) share their thoughts about how and why scholarly publishing needs to move ...

"A living article...dynamic...instead of a static document, an evolving knowledge object that combines narrative with data, code, methods, and context"

This idea comes up often, but IME scientists are rarely as enthusiastic about it as publishers... 1/2 scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/02/05/b...

look forward to reading it! Lots to think about around these issues

Best articulated here by the JCS Caveman years ago journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Meanwhile on the AI question John's argument "generating hypotheses has never been the bottleneck for science" reminds me of something a PI at the LMB once said to me, "Everyone has ideas. That's not the difficult bit..."

𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗜 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗺—𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝗧𝗲𝗫 𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀. But this isn't about LaTeX. And it's not about training data. They could get… | Adam Hyde | 25 comments 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗜 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗺—𝗮 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝗧𝗲𝗫 𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀. But this isn't about LaTeX. And it's not about training data. They could get papers from arXiv or partner with Overleaf for that. So w...

"Writing papers is rarely (probably never) the rate-limiting step in scientific research"

Important to remember this. However painful writing is, however much more efficient we can make it, for experimental work it's the research that takes the time.

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Yep - 100% my thinking (also in the US)

"authors also express frustration at the amount of work expected for a single publishable unit, a concern we
share (while humbly noting that it may not be
held by the same authors when they serve as
reviewers of other work)" <-THAT www.nature.com/articles/s41... ht @ritastrack.bsky.social

Jesus...

totally - I'm just asking if someone adds ten kilos to your backpack whether an extra 50 grams makes a difference (and if that is the right ratio)

Don't get me started on the NIH Data mandate. No guidance, no funding, no resources, no concept of what success should look like.

And compared with the burden of writing grants...? I don't mean to be facetious but genuinely curious how it would stack up against many other things we know are a (needless) burden.

Structured abstracts etc have been a goal in clinical work for years - since long before LLMs. How hard would it be now to write a paper and then have a machine-readable claim summary be generated by AI and then manually checked by the author? [genuine question] 2/2

I guess I'm wondering how much the upfront cost really is. As we see the shift from paper notebooks to ELNs and a shift from to, for example, quantitative image analysis in microscopy, is the creation of a parallel machine readable document so hard? 1/2

One quibble: I don't think that "restrictive licenses like CC BY-NC-ND...pos[e] a legal barrier to the use of LLMs in assessing
manuscripts or their peer reviews". Would you agree @lisalibrarian.bsky.social ?

And it seemed to me the request was just to complement the narrative with a machine-readable series of claims. That seems less about favoring machine-generated, big data type studies than simply wishing all studies have a machine readable component but I take your point.

I can't help noting this aspect: "Writing a scientific narrative, after synthesizing results from an experiment, is crucial to the development of those ideas. We agree with this and we are advocating for narratives to be written by scientists, rather than outsourcing writing to LLMs."

Feels very much consistent with our constellation vision for the future that distinguishes data and narrative openrxiv.org/openrxiv-day/