Richard Sever

A big issue in OA debates is different people think cost vs profits vs access vs licensing vs selection bs peer review vs professional editors are _the_ problem. And optimal solutions for some of these may be mutually exclusive 3/n

A big issue in OA debates is different people think cost vs profits vs access vs licensing vs selection bs peer review vs professional editors are _the_ problem. And optimal solutions for some of these may be mutually exclusive 3/n

Someone like me will of course favor non-profit options but many others will argue there is a role for commercial (publishers) and point to anti-OA lobbying by non-profits in the past 2/n

Gates and Wellcome both have journals/preprint servers operated by a for-profit publisher?(Taylor & Francis). Would they be expected to abandon these? 1/n

💥 🍃 Plant Plasmodesmata Cell Wall Channels by Cryo-ET

Very cool! How do cytosolic ribosomes discriminate between ER and mitochondria targeted proteins?
NAC recognizes mitochondrial targeting sequences! Very important since over 95% of the mitochondrial proteome is translated in the cytosol and then imported to mitochondria.
Congrats!

Day 2-Corrections and Retractions: Upgrading the Scientific Record This is "Day 2-Corrections and Retractions: Upgrading the Scientific Record" by The National Academies on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the…

Hilarious moment here when Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp‬ thanks bioRxiv and arXiv for "business intelligence" revealing papers submitted to Nature 🤣 5/n vimeo.com/1102568612?s...

Day 2-Corrections and Retractions: Upgrading the Scientific Record This is "Day 2-Corrections and Retractions: Upgrading the Scientific Record" by The National Academies on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the…

Other may enjoy it for my rant on what peer review is really doing: ranking not vetting articles... 4/n vimeo.com/1102568612?s...

One highlight: the withdrawal rate on bioRxiv (0.3%) is comparable to the retraction rate of journals (0.2%)... 3/n

The analogy I draw is to Nature's water memory paper (not retracted) as opposed to Science's arsenic life paper (retracted). We make no claim to verification in the first place "There will be things [on bioRxiv] that are wrong. Just as there are in journals..." 2/n

How do we correct preprints? Caveat emptor, revisions & withdrawals - what this means for the scientific record. My presentation to the National Academies 1/n vimeo.com/1102568612?s...

Interesting will look into it - I had one like that that today

🙏

bioRxiv bat signal going up. We have a big backlog of submissions. If any affiliates have time to do some screening, we (and all the authors) would be immensely grateful! 🙏

That’s always the problem - see also endless SAT/GRE debates here - but filed normalized citations and more multi dimensional approaches preferable to counting IFs and Nature X papers

Well the process is new and of course there’ll always be correlation bc the proxies aren’t totally meaningless just distorting

Yep - but I always recall something Prachee Avasthi once said to me about this: “if you’re hiring someone and you can’t understand their papers, you have bigger problems than you realize…”

This is what HHMI does - 5 papers and why they’re important independent of venue

Yep - and given the finding most papers don’t differ much between preprint and journal version, it’s key to realize that is exactly what the current system is doing: ranking articles for people who don’t want to read them or are deciding whether to

Absolutely - this is something we have to grapple with. Of course it’s possible they mean PNAS too 🤣

I have an idea… journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Biomedical publishing: Past historic, present continuous, future conditional Academic journals have been publishing the results of biomedical research for more than 350 years. Reviewing their history reveals that the ways in which journals vet submissions have changed over tim...

So caveat emptor is something everyone should bear in mind for preprints...but probably also journals. What preprints do do is be very clear about this, and they offer the opportunity to create a better, decoupled system without the current flaws 3/n journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Meanwhile as I often point out, papers that claimed COVID came from snakes, 5G towers, and outerspace were all in peer-reviewed journals, the Lancet MMR paper was unretracted for a decade, the Science arsenic life paper was unretracted for 15 years, the Nature water memory paper is still there 2/n

IMO the fact alone that something claims to be "peer-reviewed" is fairly meaningless, so much do standards vary. One can have some faith based on knowledge of individual journals' processes but if you don't know anything about the journal, then... 1/n

Biomedical publishing: Past historic, present continuous, future conditional Academic journals have been publishing the results of biomedical research for more than 350 years. Reviewing their history reveals that the ways in which journals vet submissions have changed over tim...

So caveat emptor is something everyone should bear in mind for preprints...but probably also journals. What preprints do do is be very clear about this, and they offer the opportunity to create a better, decoupled system without the current flaws 3/n journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Meanwhile as I often point out, papers that claimed COVID came from snakes, 5G towers, and outerspace were all in peer-reviewed journals, the Lancet MMR paper was unretracted for a decade, the Science arsenic life paper was unretracted for 15 years, the Nature water memory paper is still there 2/n

IMO the fact alone that something claims to be "peer-reviewed" is fairly meaningless, so much do standards vary. One can have some faith based on knowledge of individual journals' processes but if you don't know anything about the journal, then... 1/n

Vinay Prasad, a powerful FDA official, departs after controversy over rare disease drug Vinay Prasad, a top FDA official, is out after less than three months on the job.

Prasad out at FDA www.statnews.com/2025/07/29/v...

New proposal: all faculty profile pics and all posters should have the date clearly visible. In many academic dept hallways some of both date back to the 20th century.

yep - looks very familiar. I think I wrote that 😆