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.

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.

Why our Open Data project worked, (and how Decorum can allay our fears of Open Data). I am honored to Guest Post on Björn’s blog and excited about  the interest in our work from Björn’s response to Dorothy Bishop’s first post. As corresponding author on our paper, I will provide more context to our successful Open Data experience with Björn’s and Casey’s labs.

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 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry...

On our final day (day 1, day 2), I was only able to hear Boris Kotchoubey‘s (author of “why are you free?“) talk, as I had to leave early to catch my flight. He made a great effort to slowly introduce us to nonlinear dynamics and the consequences it has for the predictive power of science in general.

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.

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.

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.

Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has  given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, but profit maximization.

Last week, I spent two days at a symposium entitled “Governance, Performance & Leadership of Research and Public Organizations“. The meeting gathered professionals from all walks of science and research: economists, psychologists, biologists, epidemiologists, engineers, jurists as well as politicians, university presidents and other leaders of the most respected research organizations in Germany.

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.