Marcos PM retweeted
Journals can’t find peer reviewers. Preprints aren’t taken seriously. Garbage papers slip through peer review. Meantime, AI is slowly taking over.
Nature describes the current situation. I highly recommend reading the article.
📍 The summary (+ my comments):
1. We are facing a SIGNIFICANT overload on reviewers. Fatigue is epidemic. Few scientists have time for much peer review. As a result, manuscript turnaround times are chaos. They’re unpredictable and painfully slow.
2. Grant and facility proposals demand massive peer review too. They push the system even further.
3. Review quality is decreasing. Rigor is inconsistent. Technical aspects are poorly assessed.
4. Gatekeeping and bias are very real (we all know how manuscripts are rejected due to competition & jealousy). It causes a growing dissatisfaction among scientists.
5. Paid reviewing does NOT automatically improve the acceptance rate. Trials show mixed results. For example, acceptance rates barely increased from 48% to 53% for Critical Care Medicine. The quality of PR remained the same. But for Biology Open, the PR process has become much faster. In either case, paid reviews are very hard to scale business-wise.
6. Distributed Peer Review is becoming more popular. Some funding agencies now require applicants to review peers’ proposals. But to to eliminate bias in it? I don’t know.
❗ There’re no simple solutions.
As a careful observer, I think that the complex picture is evolving along the following trajectory:
AI-assisted peer view (AI pre-screening, AI PR-assistant, AI audition of peer reviews)
+
Community reviewing
+
Some form of compensation
+
Involvement of wider community in PR lists (not only most recognized scientists)
What’s your view on it?
Marcos PM retweeted
» The transfer of antibiotic resistance genes between evolutionary distant bacteria | bioRxiv biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
Marcos PM retweeted
Si en vez de llamarle IA (inteligencia artificial) le hubieran llamado AC (algoritmos correlacionales), que es lo que esencialmente es, nos hubiésemos evitado muchos debates mal planteados.
Marcos PM retweeted
Strong evidence showing that getting a PhD is extremely bad for your mental health.
A new paper uses Swedish medical records and matches them to the full population of PhD students for which the authors could get gender and birth year data from 2006 to 2017. After some exclusion criteria, they end up with a sample size of 20,085 individuals.
The paper compares PhD students to those who have masters degrees and don't start a PhD program.
Before starting a PhD program, people who stop at a masters and those who go on to seek a PhD have similar rates of psychiatric medication use and hospitalization.
A few years into a PhD program, however, 40% more individuals are on psychiatric medications, before the number falls off as people leave or finish their studies.
You see the same pattern with psychiatric hospitalizations. PhD students are up to 150-175% more likely to be hospitalized after starting a program!
These are incredible numbers, too massive to be the result of chance or a flaw in the methodology. This is comparing the same people over time.
If you're considering a PhD program, and the terrible job prospects and waste of time aren't enough, here's yet another reason to stay away.
Marcos PM retweeted
A phenomenon similar to an economic principle known as the Great Gatsby Curve—which describes how generational wealth predisposes one’s children to higher incomes—also plays out among scientists, argues a new study. scim.ag/866 @ScienceCareers
Marcos PM retweeted
El mercado negro de las citas: los servicios de venta de referencias falsas alarman a los científicos. Con cota al trabajo de @manuelansede sobre el rector de la #USAL nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Marcos PM retweeted
Muy interesante!!
Restringir las calorías en un 12% reduciría significativamente el ritmo de envejecimiento humano.
nature.com/articles/s43587-0…
Marcos PM retweeted
Las editoriales científicas disparan los precios y multiplican su facturación
Seis de los principales grupos han incrementado el precio medio por publicar artículos un 26,6% en los últimos cuatro años, alcanzando una facturación de un 250% más eldiario.es/1_affa4a
Marcos PM retweeted
ATTENTION academics! Do love collecting data and running analyses but HATE writing and publishing? Boy, do I have the solution for you.
Step 1: collect a BUNCH of cool data
Step 2: leave academia
Marcos PM retweeted
“Pet bioinformatician” as coined by @BioMickWatson is still an issue in #research. Why would you place a junior person in a position with no access to experience and expect all-things-#bioinformatics from said person? I simply do not get it - It’s a lose-lose scenario 🤷♂️
Marcos PM retweeted
¿Te gusta la investigación? ¿Te gustaría aprender bioinformática para el análisis de miles de genomas bacterianos, y como utilizan los CRISPR para defenderse de los fagos? Escríbeme si te interesa pedir una beca FPU xa realizar tu proyecto de tesis con nosotros en @CABD_UPO_CSIC
🔴 Convocadas 900 ayudas para la formación de profesorado universitario (FPU2022).
📆 El plazo para realizar la solicitud comienza el 17 de enero y termina el 15 de febrero de 2023.
➕ información en la web de @UniversidadGob:
universidades.gob.es/ayudas-…
Marcos PM retweeted
A keyboard for bioinformaticians to reflect how easy (some) biologists think our job is! #PushButtonBioinformatics
Marcos PM retweeted
Every bioinformatician at the department seminar
teapaw.org/Prokaryota/status/1429…
Marcos PM retweeted
Post-doctoral scholarship in bioinformatics with @gem__atkinson
Lund University, Sweden
jobrxiv.org/job/lund-univers…
#ScienceJobs #bioinformatics #postdoc
