Happy Peer Review Week! [ TLDR: To make my latest tumble down a deep rabbit hole marginally less bumpy, I downloaded >200K peer review documents for >30K articles in four open access journals published by BMC (an imprint of Springer Nature). You can find links to download these archives in full here or at the bottom of this post.

In November 2022, I migrated from Twitter to Mastodon. Since then, I also started administering a Mastodon server, and have gotten much more into the technical details of hosting services. I semi-understand ActivityPub, which Mastodon is built on – so I wondered, how does Bluesky actually work?

Previously, we discussed non-equilibrium dynamics in tidal dwarf galaxies. These are the result of interactions between giant galaxies that are manifestly a departure from equilibrium, a circumstance that makes TDGs potentially a decisive test to distinguish between dark matter and MOND, and simultaneously precludes confident application of that test.

One of the things that comes up over and over — on this blog, at conferences like DinoCon, on Q&A websites — is how to become a palaeontologist. As I’ve said before (at some length) the way to become a published palaeontologist is to publish papers about palaeontology.

Das DINI-Zertifikat definiert seit über 20 Jahren die Kriterien, die wissenschaftliche Publikationsdienste erfüllen sollten, um Qualität, Nachhaltigkeit und Interoperabilität sicherzustellen. Viele wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen und Bibliotheken orientieren Ihre Publikationsdienste an den bewährten Standards, um verlässliche, nutzer*innen- und autor*innenfreundliche Open-Access-Dienste anzubieten.

Clear Skies’ data analysis shows that peer-review rejects papers where we flag concerns. When I buy something with a credit card, I tap my card on a card reader to make a payment. It’s very convenient. Every now and then, I might go into a shop where I’ve never been before. Then, when I tap my card, I am asked to enter my Personal Identification Number (PIN) to verify that I am me. Why does this happen?

As we enter Peer Review Week 2025, we would like to propose the use of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles for scientific peer review , using these to make the process more scalable, efficient and also better equipped for the increasing use of AI in publishing. Today marks the start of Peer Review Week 2025 (PRW 2025), an annual event celebrating the vital role peer review plays in ensuring the

Ridgeline plots are a type of chart that displays the distribution of a numeric variable for different categories. These plots are commonly used to visualize changes in distributions over time. To showcase how to create ridgeline plots with {ggplot2} and {ggridges} in R, I will use data on monthly rainfall at some stations by provincies and month in Vietnam, from 2002 to 2024.

Open science has transformed how research is conducted, shared, and reused.Yet the organisations at the heart of this transformation are often left vulnerable, underfunded, and disconnected from one another.To move from simply surviving to truly thriving, five leading open science organisations – The Carpentries, OLS, rOpenSci , pyOpenSci, and PREreview – are convening to chart a collective path forward.We are so grateful to The

In 2022, we wrote a blog post “Rethinking staff travel, meetings, and events” outlining our new approach to staff travel, meetings, and events with the goal of not going back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic and said that in the future we would report on our efforts to balance online

Appalachian History Series Blue Springs, known locally as the community around Midway and today within Mosheim, sat on the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad. On October 10, 1863, Union forces under Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside met Confederate cavalry under Brig. Gen. John S. “Cerro Gordo” Williams here and drove them from the line.