NIH, 1961: Journals are slow and cumbersome, why don&#8217;t we experiment with circulating preprints among peers to improve on the way we do science (Information Exchange Groups)? Publishers, 1967: You have got to be kidding. Nobody cares about improving science, [&#8230;] <a class="more-link" href="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2020/03/the-ultimate-open-access-timeline/">&#8595; Read the rest of this entry...</a>

University of Regensburg

Björn Brembs

So this is essentially what happened instead of us sitting down and thinking how we could spend our money in the most technologically savvy way to the benefit of science, scholars and society. A generation later, roughly US$300 billion poorer and none the wiser, it seems.

The ultimate Open Access timeline

Trial and error is a successful problem-solving strategy not only in humans but throughout evolution. How do nervous systems generate novel, creative trials and how are errors incorporated into already existing experiences in order to improve future trials?

Come and do research with us!

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI’s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58):    Scholarly Communication: Deconstruct &amp; Decentralize? Video von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden.

Why academic journals need to go

While the first day (day 2, day 3) was dominated by philosophy, mathematics and other abstract discussions of chance, this day of our symposium started with a distinct biological focus.

 Martin Heisenberg, Chance in brain and behavior

First speaker for this second day on the symposium on the role of chance in the living world was my thesis supervisor and mentor, Martin Heisenberg.

Chance in animate nature, day 2

While our own manuscript on journal rank is almost through the peer-review process, this morning I received several messages announcing the DORA (

 San Francisco declaration on research Assessment

), which I signed immediately.

Official call for an end to journal rank

Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform), as long as these events do not entail a clear goal for action. I have several reasons for this decision, most of them boil down to a cost/benefit estimate. The time spent traveling does not seem worth the hardly noticeable benefits any more. I got involved in Open Science more than 10 years ago.

Open Science: Too much talk, too little action

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by librarian Jeffrey Beall.

Predatory Priorities

Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accepted manuscript public?

What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?

Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any further disruptions.

Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions

Over the weekend, I received the following short message from a Hotmail account: This email is full of signs that the student may not have been all that interested in any information or discourse, but instead trying to make some sort of ‘gotcha’ statement. Curiously, the author first states that their scientific training is lacking and then they disagree with a scientific position.

How not to contact faculty as student

tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts.   I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.

What is the difference between text, data and code?

By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in

 Science Magazine

last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.

How embarrassing was the ‘journal sting’ for Science Magazine?

*During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

A fistful of dollars: why corporate publishers have no place in scholarly communication

I usually don’t write about politics, but there has been one or the other exception to this rule in the last 12 years of this blog. This time, I’ve been missing one particular response to the various terrorist attacks in recent times, perhaps one of the few readers of this obscure blog has found it somewhere and can point me in this direction?

Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?

Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion.

With more and more evaluations, assessments and quality control, the peer-review burden has skyrocketed in recent years.

Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it

At seemingly every possibility in a discussion on peer-review, people apparently feel the need to emphasize that in the current model reviewers (or most academic editors handling peer-review) are not being paid.

Peer-review is not free – it’s a subsidy for publishers

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the editors at the New York Times.

Free will:  it’s not what you think it is

Barely a fortnight has passed since

 Science Magazine

published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion

Just before Christmas 2019, the Washington Post reported, based on “people familiar with the matter”, that the US Justice Department were investigating the Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan for potentially “working with Russian intelligence to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors”. Besides such a highly unusual connection, the article also reiterated unsubstantiated (but mainly circulated by publishers) allegations that access

Is the SNSI the new PRISM?

Questionable Research Practices

For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their

 content

, rather than counting the applicants’ previous publications. However, not all of DFG’s panels seem to be on board.

Research assessment: new panels, new luck?

We are looking for a PhD student interested in the functional, molecular and structural profile of neuronal circuits underlying learning, memory and behavior. In a 30-year research effort (lay summary, paper), we have recently identified a new gene (atypical PKC, aPKC) necessary for a form of motor learning in the fruit fly

 Drosophila

and in which neurons it is required.

We are looking for a PhD student

It’s the time of the year again where 30,000 neuroscientists head to the US to talk neuroscience. This year the big annual conference is in Washington, DC, one of the three cities able to host this large event. Our first poster will be up on Tuesday morning and shows results from operant self-stimulation experiments using optogenetics and dopaminergic neurons.

Heading for #SfN23 with two posters

In a discussion about what decisions are, John Krakauer emphatically pronounced that “decisions happen for reasons”, in answering ‘no’ to my question if it wasn’t a decision with which foot to start walking from a stand-still. A recent article from the laboratory of Carolina Rezaval in Birmingham studied a decision-making process in male

 Drosophila

fruit flies where the reasons for each decision seemed apparent.

What is a decision?

Universities worldwide currently face a pivotal choice: should they contribute to building a global infrastructure for exchange, science, and discourse, free from the control of oligarchs, to promote democracy, human rights, and digital participation? Or should they continue advertising on private networks, hoping for clicks and marginally increased student enrollment?

By their actions you shall know them

It has been almost 10 years now that we have come to the realization that a particular type of our operant experiments can be classified as motor learning. In such “operant self-learning” experiments, the animal learns about the consequences of its own behavior and adjusts future behavior accordingly.

Motor learning at #SfN24

A few years ago, I came across a cartoon that seemed to capture a particular aspect of scholarly journal publishing quite well:  The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat.

How reliable is the scholarly literature?

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public.

No Evilsevier DEAL!

Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we may not have decades to get our house in order. The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics. Around the world, anti-science movements seek to discredit reason and abolish science.

Scholarship has no time to waste

I just sent the poster for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting to the printer. As our graduate student is preparing his defense and our postdoc did not get a visa (no thanks, US!), we just have a single poster this year and I will present it myself on Monday, November 14, 2022, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM, on poster board WW53.

Interacting learning systems at SfN22

More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda.

 Front cover of

the now-vanished

 Australasian Journal of Bone &amp; Joint Medicine

. Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

The trinity of failures

A recent OASPA guest post reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years now. What sinister time travel device is keeping some sections of the scholarly ecosystem from leaving the past and coming back to the present?

What sinister time machine?

For a few years now I have been arguing that in order to accomplish change in scholarly infrastructure, it likely is an inefficient plan by funding agencies to mandate the least powerful players in the game, authors (i.e., their grant recipients). The legacy publishing system still exists because institutions pay for its components, publishers.

Can funders mandate institutions?

The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat:  we have a reproducibility leakan affordability leaka functionality leaka data leaka code leakan interoperability leaka discoverability leaka peer-review leaka long-term preservation leaka link rot leakan evaluation/assessment leaka data visualization leak………and even a tiny access leak still remains even after 30 years of trying to fix it.  While some

Scholarly publishing in three cartoons

For a number of years now, publishers who expect losing revenue in a transition to Open Access have been spreading fear about journals which claim to perform peer-review on submitted manuscripts, but then collect the publishing fee of a few hundred dollars (about 5-10% of what these legacy publishers charge) without performing any peer-review at all.

Elsevier now officially a “predatory” publisher

Scientists are used to vested interests disputing scientific claims. Tobacco corporations have tried to discredit the science about lung cancer and smoking, creationists keep raising always the same, long-debunked objections against evolution, climate-deniers claim the earth is cooling, anti-vaxxers believe the MMR vaccine causes autism and homeopaths delude themselves that a little drop of nothing has magical healing powers.

Unpersuadables: When scientists dismiss science for political reasons

After almost 25 years since Stevan Harnad’s “subversive proposal“, now, finally, scholars and the public have a range of avenues at their disposal to access nearly every scholarly article. Public access, while not the default, has finally arrived. Granted, while all of the current options are considered legal for the

 reader

, not all

 providers

of scholarly literature conform to every law in every country.

With the access issue temporarily solved, what now?

At the end of this year, our amazing postdoc Axel is going back to Argentina to start his own lab. This means we are looking for a new postdoc to start next year. Earliest starting date is February 11, 2018.

Come do research with us!

Public institutions the world over are required to spend their funds responsibly. Commonly, this is done by requiring them to host bids for purchases or services above a certain threshold. If you work at a public institution and have wondered, e.g., why you are only allowed to buy a computer from your computing facility which only sells one particular brand, then the answer likely is that this brand won the bidding contest.

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.


 UPDATE


 , 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Booming university administrations

A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because that would risk their and their employees’ jobs. Librarians, equally correctly, argue that they would cancel subscriptions if faculty wouldn’t complain about ensuing access issues.

Practical roads to infrastructure reform

This is our first poster at this year’s SfN meeting in San Diego. It’s about decision-making in fruit flies. We find a probabilistic form of decision-making that suggests that without understanding the mechanisms behind this fundamental uncertainty, we will never fully understand decision-making. Clicking on the image will let you download the PDF Version of the poster.

Do flies in groups make individual choices?

At various meetings I get often asked by early career researchers, librarians or other colleagues what my interactions with publishers felt like. I usually answer that my last twelve years campaigning for infrastructure reform felt like academia was receiving the big middle finger from publishers: No matter what you try, academia, we’ll still get your money, stupid suckers!

What interacting with publishers felt like for this open access proponent

In her recent editorial on Sci-Hub (an initiative I support), editor-in-chief of

 Science Magazine

Marcia McNutt wrote: The editorial is essentially trying to make the somewhat tenuous but not implausible case that using sci-hub may lead to subscription cancellations which, in turn, may lead to scholarly societies (like those of Dr. McNutts employer, AAAS) to miss revenue they need in order to pay for important services (such as paying

In which a Science editorial demonstrates the ineffectiveness of OA activism

Posting my reply to a review of our most recent grant proposal has sparked an online discussion both on Twitter and on Drugmonkey’s blog. The main direction the discussion took was what level of expertise to expect from the reviewers deciding over your grant proposal. This, of course, is highly dependent on the procedure by which the funding agency chooses the reviewers.

How to write your grant proposal?

This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me, Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson’s guest post, which focused on the open data aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind our paper and a second one by Nelson, which just appeared in PLoS Genetics.

Laboratories around the world are generating a tsunami of deep-sequencing data from nearly every organism, past and present.

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

Ulrich Herkenrath, a mathematician working on stochasticity, convened a tiny symposium of only about a dozen participants discussing the role of chance in living beings. Participants included mathematicians, philosophers and neurobiologists.

Chance in animate nature, day 1

Writing in the latest issue of Lab Times, Alex Reis portraits two sections of ‘do-it-yourself’ in the biosciences. One is the group of ‘citizen scientists’, some of which are organized in DIYbio.

Is DIY really just for the scholarly poor?

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

Thinking more generally about the “Recursive Fury” debacle, something struck me as somewhat of an eye opener: the lack of support for the authors by Frontiers and the demonstrative support by their institution, UWA (posting the retracted article). Even though this might be the first time a scholarly journal caved in to legal pressure from anti-science groups, it should perhaps come as no surprise.

Conflicts of interest even for ‘good’ scholarly publishers

I can now announce the first closed beta testing phase of an RSS reader intended for scientists. So far, we have something like a Feedly clone with a few extras built in, such as collecting the most tweeted articles of the last 24h, some rudimentary ability to sort/filter either feeds or groups of feeds. It’s not a whole lot, yet, so keep your expectations low  We’re just getting started.

Interested in testing an RSS reader for science?

Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and comparing them to subscription costs. Such studies are fundamental prerequisites for evidence-based policies and informed decisions on how to proceed with bitterly needed reforms.

A study justifying waste of tax-funds?

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: After more than 40 years at university with work weeks of 60-70 hours, I retired in 2010 and decided to limit work to 40 hours per week, concentrate on what I [&#8230;] <a class="more-link" href="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2013/09/retiring-from-science/">&#8595; Read the rest of this entry...</a>

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!

Retiring from science?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science

Since the birth of our daughter, we spend our summers in Sweden, just like I used to, when I was little. This not only allows her to get more practice in Swedish then she gets talking with just me or her grandmother, but we also get to really recharge our batteries in the fabulous wilderness up there.

How to recharge in Sweden

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from February 9, 2011:

Flashback: Nothing new in science?

This year marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of this legendary letter to the editor in the Journal of systems and Software:  Nothing really has changed in a dozen years, it seems

12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor

In which potatoes in France are like high-ranking journals in science

Flashback: ‘stimulus-response’ concept based on artifacts?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I want to use this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This is the first post in this series, just to see if it works and what needs to be tweaked.

Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning

Yesterday, Alex Kacelnik published yet another fascinating discovery – one of many over the years out of his lab. This time, they show how birds can pick even five consecutive locks to get to a food reward:    According to the authors, the birds solve this problem by trial and error, i.e., in the operant, goal-directed way, which is the learning mechanism we study in our lab.

…and now for some lock-picking cockatoos

Mike Taylor wrote about how frustrated he is that funders don’t issue stronger open access mandates with sharper teeth. He acknowledges that essentially, the buck stops with us, the scientists, but mentions that pressures on scientists effectively prevent them from driving publishing reform.

Funder mandates: Are scientists like junkies?

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope):    BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

One more reason to publish negative results

Today, finally, our manuscript on journal rank is accepted for publication at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. One may wonder how a paper that reviews the empirical findings around journal rank ends up in a journal about human neuroscience.

Everybody already knows journal rank is bunk

Amazing Slow Motion Bead Chain Experiment | Slow Mo | BBC Earth ExploreVideo von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden.

Amazing bead chain experiment

Until 1986, it was thought that so-called optomotor responses, i.e., the tendency of all animals and humans to follow moving visual stimuli with their eyes or their bodies, were a prerequisite for gaze or trajectory stabilization: whenever the scenery in your gaze moves, you adjust gaze or body orientation to compensate for the shift.

Dissecting a fly’s course control system

Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access“. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy

Is this Smits’ tripleC moment?

UPDATE

: I’m still not completely sure I understood Churchland accurately, but there are comments suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself! I really like Patricia Churchland.

[updated]Churchland: “Ignore science and live a make-believe life!”

Flashback: Programming Free Will – creative robots

Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying mainly on corporate publishers with monopoly status.

Academic publishing – market or collectivization?

Reading the reactionary defense of the digital stone age in AAAS’ flagship magazine

 Science

, I felt reminded of the now infamous “Make American Science Great Again” letter to Trump and all the other public statements by scholarly societies over the last 30 years on how this internet thing is a threat to their revenue and hence must be opposed.

Scholarly societies partly to blame for post-truth age?

Think, check, submit: who hasn’t heard of this mantra to help researchers navigate the jungle of commercial publishers? Who isn’t under obligation to publish in certain venues, be it because employers ask for a particular set of journals for hiring, tenure or promotion, or because of funders‘ open access mandates?

How academic institutions neglect their duty

Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the

 FoxP

locus of

 Drosophila

with anatomical and behavioral characterizations of the various transgenic lines she has created.

With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19

Around the globe, there are initiatives and organizations devoted to bring “Open Access” to the world, i.e., the public availability of scholarly research works, free of charge.

Scholarship has bigger fish to fry than access

There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned defunding of the endowments of arts and humanities or the initiatives to completely abolish the EPA and other science agencies.

Are we inadvertently supporting the defunding of public science?

We are looking for a a permanent, full-time technician, arguably the most important position in our laboratory. The main perks that come with the position are that it is permanent and that we are a small group of very enthusiastic colleagues where there is always something different going on. For those so inclined, we also offer the possibility to conduct their own research projects, to the extent the candidate feels comfortable with.

Come work with us!

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly

 Drosophila

(more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.

Why use fruit flies to study a gene involved in language?

For the last few years, we have been working on the development of new

 Drosophila

flight simulators. Now, finally, we are reaching a stage where we are starting to think about how to store the data we’ll be capturing both with Open Science in mind, but particularly keeping in mind that this will likely be the final major overhaul of this kind of data until I retire in 20 years.

Data structures for Open Science

This is a response to Dorothy Bishop&#8217;s post &#8220;Who&#8217;s afraid of open data?&#8220;. After we had published a paper on how Drosophila strains that are referred to by the same name in the literature (Canton S), but came from different [&#8230;] <a class="more-link" href="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/11/dont-be-afraid-of-open-data/">&#8595; Read the rest of this entry...</a>

This is a response to Dorothy Bishop’s post “Who’s afraid of open data?“. After we had published a paper on how

 Drosophila

strains that are referred to by the same name in the literature (Canton S), but came from different laboratories behaved completely different in a particular behavioral experiment, Casey Bergman from Manchester contacted me, asking if we shouldn’t sequence the genomes of these five fly strains to find out how they

Don’t be afraid of open data

Apparently, the outrage of science denialists over their exposure in a recent psychological paper shows no signs of abating. It was denialists’ complaints and legal threats of libel/defamation suits that started the investigation of the paper and also in the comments to my post announcing my resignation as editor for

 Frontiers

, the denialists complained that their public blog comments were used in a scientific paper.

If you comment online, you’re on stage

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 it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This is commonly done by negotiating the articles in the denominator.

Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?

The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse than the desolate state we call the

 status quo

today.

Whither now, Open Access?

Rejection is one of the unpleasant but inevitable components of life. There are positive components to rejection: they build character, they force you to deal with negativity and sometimes they force you to change your life to avoid future rejections.

The cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle

At this year&#8217;s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior, I was invited to give the keynote presentation on the relationship between classical and operant conditioning. Using the slides below, I argued that Skinner already had identified a weakness in [&#8230;] <a class="more-link" href="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/02/two-evolutionary-conserved-fundamental-learning-mechanisms/">&#8595; Read the rest of this entry...</a>

Genetically Separable" href="https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14" target="_blank"&gt;Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically Separable

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

Flashback: The brain creates something out of nothing

Scientists as social parasites?

In the process of migrating content from the old site to WordPress, I’m also moving some articles from there and re-publishing them here as posts. This one is such a case, originally published on December 7, 2006.

Brains as output/input systems

Flashback: Noise in the brain?

The recently released development draft for SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), authored by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in response to the OSTP memo on public access to federally funded research in the US sounds a lot like the library-based publishing system I’ve been perpetually arguing for.

SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?

Until today, I was quite proud of myself for not caving in to SIWOTI syndrome like Mike Taylor did. And then I read his post and caved in as well. What gets us so riled up is Elsevier’s latest in a long list of demonstration of what they think of the intellectual capacities of their customers. It’s precisely because it is only one in a long row that I initially didn’t feel like commenting.

Is this supposed to be the best Elsevier can muster?

I really loathe reviewing for GlamMagz for two main reasons. For one, it’s hard to remain neutral: publication of a paper in my field in such a journal is beneficial both for the field and for the young people who are authors on this paper. Second, the demands of some of my colleagues so often make my blood boil. At that point I’m very happy these reviews are anonymous and I really don’t want to know the names of these colleagues.

Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again

In our new lab here in Regensburg, we are currently re-establishing the method of confocal microscopy. To start with, we used the fly lines which show a defect in the temporal structure of their spontaneous behavior (a project of one of our graduate students). this fly line uses two transgenic constructs (c105 and c232) to drive expression in specified neurons in the fly brain, i.e., the merged expression patterns of c105 and c232.

A wonderful example of Open Science

I’ve just been invited to edit a special issue in the MDPI journal ‘publications‘ on a topic I can specify. If I do it, I thought it should revolve around replacing journal rank (i.e., altmetrics, ALM, etc.) and other (technical?) means to transcend a journal-based literature towards a coherent knowledge-dissemination infrastructure that incorporates of course text, but also software and data.

Special issue on publishing reform?

Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.

Providing recommendations for Plan S implementation

Flashback: All brains possess free will because there is no design in biology

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968: The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)Video von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden.

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted this one on Agust 31, 2011:

A nice song with a really cool little video: They Might Be Giants - Science is Real (official TMBG video)Video von YouTube laden. Dabei können personenbezogene Daten an Drittanbieter übermittelt werden.

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

Few insect behaviors are more iconic than the proverbial moths circling the lamps at night. Artist: Dave McKean  These observations are prime examples of the supposedly stereotypic insect responses to external stimuli. In contrast, in our new paper that just appeared today, we describe experiments suggesting that insects appear to make a value-based decision before approaching the light.

Why did the moth fly into the flame?

It was my freshman year, 1991. I was enthusiastic to finally be learning about biology, after being forced to waste a year in the German army’s compulsory service at the time. Little did I know that it was the same year a research paper was published that would guide the direction of my career to this day, more than 30 years later. Many of the links in this post will go to old web pages I created while learning about this research.

bjoern.brembs.blog

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