Benjamin Swedlund

A bold call to challenge the status quo in scientific publishing: «Science advances through disagreement, through competing hypotheses tested against reality. Why should scientific communication be any different? »

Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You. Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem.

New Blog Post:
Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You.

pracheeac.substack.com/p/scholarly-...

The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada has learned this morning, Wednesday, October 1st, 2025, that Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away due to natural causes.

She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States.

So how do we judge the quality & impact of a preprint?
What platforms exist for journal-agnostic peer review?
👀 Let’s talk about that next week.
5/5

Do preprints have to end up in journals? Stefano Vianello boldly says no.
He preprinted his PhD work, then had it peer-reviewed via a journal-agnostic platform — refusing to choose between paywalls or APCs.
A great read: stefanovianello.github.io/posts/2021/0...
4/5

Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints in the biomedical sciences are being posted and accessed at unprecedented rates, but can we trust them? This study reveals that the majority of preprints publis...

Why is preprint uptake so low?
❌ Cons often cited:
* ❓ Lower perceived quality (though studies show minor changes pre vs post vs. peer-review): tinyurl.com/plosbiologyP...

* 📉 Variable recognition for promotions/graduation

* 🏁 Scooping concerns

* ⚠️ Risk of misinformation
3/5

The relationship between bioRxiv preprints, citations and altmetrics Abstract. A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences. We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behavior of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and nondeposited articles published in the same journals. We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to nondeposited articles. Regression analysis reveals that this advantage is not explained by multiple explanatory variables related to the articles’ publication venues and authorship. Further research will be required to establish whether such an effect is causal in nature. bioRxiv preprints themselves are being directly cited in journal articles, regardless of whether the preprint has subsequently been published in a journal. bioRxiv preprints are also shared widely on Twitter and in blogs, but remain relatively scarce in mainstream media and Wikipedia articles, in comparison to peer-reviewed journal articles.

✅ Pros of preprints:
* 🚀 Rapid sharing

* 👀 More visibility&citations (tinyurl.com/bioRXiv-cita...)

* ⏱ Priority (who did it first)

* 📑 Proof of productivity for job&grant applications

* 🌍 Open access

* ⚖️ No journal branding bias

Yet only ~13% of life science papers are preprinted first.
2/5

When I asked my PI @leonardomorsut.bsky.social why he publishes all our lab’s work first as preprints, he said:
“It seemed like the obvious thing to do.”
In mammalian synBio, we’re lucky: most of the community uses preprints. Why it matters 👇 1/5

Different cell types are like oil and water - check out my @epimechfc.bsky.social thread on differential adhesion and its potential applications in tissue engineering!

Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations? Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before...

5/4 Refs:
(1) bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/just...
(2) www.nature.com/nature-index...
(3) www.coalition-s.org
(4) www.nature.com/articles/d41...
(5) www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-worl...
(6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

One striking fact: only ~13% of life science articles are first posted as preprints (6). Why so little? That’s what I’ll explore next week! 4/4

Yes, revisions improved the paper—but was it worth the wait? I believe the current system slows progress & hinders collaboration. Although open access is now often mandated (3), it doesn’t fix other issues such as publication delays, reviewer shortages, or publishers’ unreasonable profits (4,5). 3/4

During my PhD, it took almost two years of submission, rejection & revision between first submission and final publication. Not easy to fit into a 4-year PhD contract in Belgium. Even after publication, my article was only free after a 6-month embargo, and the final version is still paywalled. 2/4

Why am I interested in preprints? For me, they tie directly to two fundamentals of academia: how we share findings and how we evaluate each other. Preprints can accelerate research and support new ways of evaluating scientists—beyond metrics we currently use, like journal impact factor (1,2). 1/4

Collective cell motion has many forms, but rotation is the coolest of them all.

I'm @onenimesa.bsky.social , and in this short🧵, I'll highlight some instances of global tissue rotation like this one from @BauschLab

Grateful to @jacoates.bsky.social for leading this year's @asapbio.bsky.social Fellows program! What a great way to build community around shared values in open science. I'm now motivated to keep advocating - stay tuned for resources, reflections & hopes for a better future in academia (and beyond)!

NIH wants to hear from you. No really.

Request for Information on Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

Engineering yeast multicellular behaviors via synthetic adhesion and contact signaling By designing synthetic toolkits for contact-based signaling (MARS) and cell-cell adhesion (SATURN), we program yeast to form multicellular structures and perform complex tasks, like building logic cir...

Online now @ Cell is the yeast multicellular engineering paper from Fankang Meng - the fruits of his productive PhD in our group. He developed modular synthetic biology tools to bring multicellular behaviours to yeast - specific adhesion, juxtacrine signalling and more. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Exciting Research Professorship Position in Stem Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Leuven. Amazing research ecosystem, great colleagues, high quality of life, tenure track. For those interested in joining us, please see below:
www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

A notecard with the words 'HAVE YOUR SAY...'

Enter our essay competition and win £250. Share with us your ideas on how to innovate event organisation to have a lower environmental impact. Find out how to enter at biologists.com/stories/essa...

From the Editors-in-Chief of all @biologists.bsky.social's journals: "In these uncertain times, we must strengthen our international scientific networks. We must build new bridges of collaboration. We must speak with a unified voice in support of evidence-based policymaking and scientific freedom."

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

PhD program IFP Energies nouvelles, a French public research and innovation organisation, offers PhD positions in a wide range of scientific disciplines (chemistry, biotechnology, applied mathematics, economics, ...

Most EU organisations post on euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/funding... as well as findaphd.com

Thank you for submitting your Letter of Intent (LOI) to CZI. We appreciate your interest in our work. CZI has decided not to continue with the second round of its Science Diversity Leadership Awards. We are committed to supporting groundbreaking research that advances the frontiers of scientific knowledge in pursuit of our mission to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century. We will provide information on future funding opportunities. We look forward to staying in touch. Bil Clemons, Program Officer, CZI

Pretty sad. Just got the email that CZI is canceling the second round of Diversity Leadership Awards. Private industry will definitely not fill the hole that NIH and NSF are leaving. 😢💔

The most memorable science travel of my PhD - strongly recommend applying! Great science in a beautiful setting

My feed is overwhelmed with scientists right now calling out the catastrophic consequences of the NIH indirect cost order from last night. If those same people aren't also speaking out against the anti-trans, anti-DEI, anti-immigrant orders...we are lost. The only path forward is solidarity.

The scientific publishing landscape is evolving, arguably for the better, promoting more open access, transparency, and objectivity - bibliographic databases should follow suit and be open to promoting this evolution and exploration of different ways to publish science

Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering Scientists and engineers often spend days choosing a problem and years solving it. This imbalance limits impact. Here, we offer a framework for problem choice: prompts for ideation, guidelines for evaluating impact and likelihood of success, the importance of fixing one parameter at a time, and opportunities afforded by failure.

On the same theme: Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...