Catherine Hulshof

How Dryad data curators help make data sharing simple for researchers | Dryad news Data sharing can be challenging. Dryad’s experienced data curators smooth the way with expert, hands-on support for researchers to ensure that all the data we publish is findable, accessible, interope...

Researchers choose Dryad for all kinds of reasons. One of the biggest is our curatorial team.

Expert data curators screen each submission and work with researchers to ensure high-quality, FAIR-compliant data publications.

bit.ly/3KBT38E

#opendata #openscience #openaccess #datasharing #scisky

La caída de una megarrevista científica expone el pelotazo de las editoriales en la ciencia Una de las cabeceras que más estudios publican en el mundo, expulsada del sistema por irregularidades. Su editorial, Elsevier, supera los 1.300 millones de euros de beneficios al año

1- El truculento caso de la revista "Science of the Total Environment" que cobra 3600 euros por publicar un paper, y cuyo director figuró como coautor de 200 artículos publicados allí mismo. elpais.com/ciencia/2025...

'Nobody wants to scale back the industrialization of education it would mean losing money'

Are we still not convinced that education is outdated, not meeting needs of millions and perpetuating inequities? But I've yet to see viable alternatives (except maybe the return of trade schools)

I had the same Q. Many people handle a manuscript (editor, handling editor, reviewers). Who's not doing their job and how do we oust these bad actors? If we don't, publishing in certain outlets becomes meaningless. That's why I publish w/ society journals. You know the people behind the process.

Why I Broke Up With Wirecutter Graham Downey tells us about how he tried to stop worrying and love the Wirecutter—and how it quietly took over his life.

In it's early days @nytwirecutter.bsky.social was the alternative to Consumer Reports but now it just encourages rampant consumerism, wrapped up in mirages of 'quality'. Today's digestif long read:

Why I Broke Up With Wirecutter share.google/Eve6L92jBbKB...

When the turpials arrive, hurricane season is over, trade winds start, and surf is up in #PuertoRico. The tropics have many seasons too if you know how to look.

Where does everyone send their tropical plant samples for species identification using DNA barcoding? Guelph?🙏 Leaves are preferable, but if the leaves are too high for pole pruner, what then? Cambium? Thanks for any leads.

🌵 In tropical dry forests, drought avoiders (isohydric) thrive in dry sites with fast growth, while tolerators (anisohydric) dominate wetter areas, boosting biomass non-linearly 👇
buff.ly/8dpEhNv

So: if you were to suspend your knee-jerk reaction and, instead, imagine a perfect world, what qualities would a pay-peer-reviewers model have to have for it to work? Now that's the interesting question/thought exercise no importa (y no judgement) whether you are for or against.

Fin.

I'm not for or against. But I specialize in exploring ideas outside of how we currently operate. Because how we currently operate clearly ain't working.

We are comfortable with NSF honorariums for review panelists but not comfortable with paying for manuscript reviewers. Why? NSF has prestige advantage? Volume/workload is different? Stakes are different?

We love data yet are convinced by anecdotal feelings of how this would be a very bad, no good, terrible idea...without any kind of pilot data/info to base those feelings on...what do existing models out there say? I honestly don't know. Just spit-balling and looking for fellow spit-ballers.

Few people are willing to suspend disbelief and 'play' from a place of imagination/creativity...skills we are suppose to be good at.

Most people hate the idea for all the obvious reasons. Already part of service, where would $ come from, blah, blah, blah.

"How Might We" design a pay-peer-reviewers model that prevents perverse incentives? Training/certifications? Vetted reviewers? Rating reviewers? I asked this question in a @esajournals.bsky.social cross-portfolio discussion and here is what I learned:

Why Transformational Science Can't Get Funded: The Einstein Problem

"The conservative nature and risk-averse mentality of modern grant review panels are deeply rooted in the scientific community’s culture that values incremental advances over speculative leaps" Why transformational science can't get funded.
open.substack.com/pub/sciencep...

CharlotteFive on Instagram: "🛒 COMPARE FOODS OFFERS FREE DELIVERY: Charlotte grocery store Compare Foods (@comparefoodsclt) is offering free pickup and delivery through Dec. 31 to protect the city’s i... Compare Foods, a Charlotte-based grocery store, has announced a new initiative to support the city's immigrant community by offering free pickup and delivery services. This move aims to provide conven...

This Charlotte grocery is offering free delivery for online orders in case customers don't feel comfortable leaving their homes.

www.instagram.com/reel/DRGIZ9q...

A US citizen filmed federal agents smashing his car window, as authorities begin a surge of immigration enforcement operations in North Carolina.

The Honduran-born Charlotte resident filed a police report after the officers let him go.

The @esajournals.bsky.social is hosting a cross-portfolio conversation next week. If you are a subject matter editor like me, come and voice your ideas. It's gonna take brave, bold, new ideas to push back against this multi-headed beast.

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/...

All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic Our planet supports nearly 8.7 million species. We break down the total composition of the living world in terms of its biomass.

Full infographic available here: www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biom...

How to not be swamped by your microclimate data Microclimate data are finally finding their way more routineously into ecological models – and rightly so. Hooray for that! The growing availability of in-situ measurements is helping us brid…

How to not be swamped by your microclimate data?

The rise of microclimate data may have opened Pandora’s box. Gone are the days of simple bioclimatic variables — now heads spin trying to summarize these timeseries.

A much-needed paper by @krystofchytry.bsky.social:

🔗 the3dlab.org/2025/11/11/h...

Anyone know how to revoke a submission with Wiley's shitty AI system? 6 months with no reviewers? Hellnah.

Mint Mobile | Wireless that's Easy, Online, $15 Bucks a Month Mint Mobile re-imagined the wireless shopping experience and made it easy and online-only. No stores. No salespeople. Just huge direct to you savings on nationwide phone plans.

Anyone else tightening up that family #budget? Just switched from T-Mobile to Mint Mobile for a $1200/year #savings. DM me if you want the referral coupon. We also cancelled Netflix (gasp). Any other easy ways to save? www.mintmobile.com

A la Stanford's d.school, ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination, @austinkleon.bsky.social

who else?

Hey creatives: who do you follow for inspiration? Trying to cut out slop and surround myself with incredible, bold, pie-in-the-sky ideas.

'El río no tiene culpa': la canción de una pareja afectada por la DANA - Climática, el medio especializado en clima y biodiversidad Un año después de las lluvias e inundaciones donde perdieron la vida 227 personas, Alejandro y María Laura, artistas afectados por la DANA, lanzan junto a Greenpeace una canción inédita que transforma el dolor en un himno por la justicia climática.

‘El río no tiene culpa’: la canción de una pareja afectada por la DANA

Assistant Professor, Earth System Science, School of Life Sciences and Sustainability - VCU Main Campus, Virginia, United States Unit: College of Humanit and Sciences MBU Department: School of Life Sci & Sustainability Duties & Responsibilities: The School of Life Sciences and Sustainability (SLSS) at Virginia Commonwea...

Come work in Richmond, Virginia. Assistant Professor, Earth Systems Science @ VCU.

vcujobs.com/jobs/assista...

No new lab papers. But here's my first try at digital collage from souvenirs I picked up in #Oaxaca #Mexico during the #ATBC meeting. #arte-ciencia #collage

Silvana Estrada: Tiny Desk Concert Silvana Estrada's powerful, yet elegant voice finds a way to bend wounds to her will and become whole.

Silvana Estrada's powerful, yet elegant voice finds a way to bend wounds to her will and become whole. n.pr/4oat8DP