TL;DR: The Papermill Alarm has grown to become a comprehensive mix of methods for detecting organised research fraud and simplifying a complex problem. But there’s something new. Something bigger and better from Clear Skies.
When last we left our rodent community at Portal, things were still…weird. Recap: In fall of 2023, one of our most abundant species, Chaetodipus penicillatus (Desert pocket mouse), experienced a population crash right before their seasonal torpor for the winter. Had they hibernated early or had we really lost individuals? We could only wait and see what happened in the spring. Spring came and still no Desert pocket mouse.
Apologies, this will be obvious to some, but I have seen enough so-so images on social media to convince me there are others who could post much better pictures if they took just a little bit more care. Smartphone cameras are so good these days that everyone is a photographer. But clearly, everyone isn’t a photographer.
Today is my last day at Imperial College London. It marks the completion of exactly 29 years as a member of staff. Two talks, about 30 years apart.
On Tuesday evening I was asked by Research Professional News for my views on a new report from think tank UKDayOne, which is calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, unlovingly known as the REF. The report is provocative and interesting. It has won loud support from one Dominic Cummings.
Interested in understanding how ecological systems change through time? Morgan Ernest’s Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student to start Fall 2025. The new student will work with our long-term field site in Portal, Arizona to study biodiversity dynamics of mammals and plants to understand and predict changes in species abundances and biodiversity in response to changing climate and biotic conditions.
(Blog post) “MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier” by Cory Doctorow. This blog post is about the collective action problem of moving academic publishing away from the big corporate publishers that extract millions of dollars/year from scholarly research while contributing very little in return. It reports on an encouraging report by SPARC about MIT’s success in canceling their Elsevier subscriptions.
This is a repost of an article that was originally published on the Research on Research Institute website. Comments welcome! It is a truth universally acknowledged that scientists who take greater risks are more likely to make important discoveries.
One of the joys of posting a preprint is seeing that people are viewing, downloading and (hopefully) reading your paper. On bioRxiv you can check out the statistics for your paper in the metrics tab. We posted a preprint recently and it clocked up over 1,000 views in the first day or so. This made me wonder: is that a lot of views or not? How does it compare to other preprints in our category?
Ethan White’s lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a PhD student starting in Fall 2025 to study ecological forecasting of wading birds in the Everglades.