Interested in a 12-month postdoc in Brazil? 🇧🇷 Join us in vibrant São Paulo for cutting-edge research in biomolecular simulation and design. 🤓
Check out the details here: fulbright.org.br/awards-for-u...
Brilliant, thanks!
This is so true. What makes it even harder to navigate these stories are often substandard description of methods and data analyses, combined with reduction of massive datasets to a yet-another-novel-but-incomprehensible plot that lacks labels and clear description in the figure legend.
Papers are increasingly challenging to navigate, not only because of the sheer volume of data they contain but also because of their structure. This is a delicate point of discussion that we, as a community, should address. I would love hearing your views on this.
network.febs.org/posts/thinki...
Colourful image from the webpage of the Royal Society. Background is a mix of images of electronic circuits and silicon wafers. Text reads: "Welcome to the Royal Society. We are the independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity."
FOR THE RECORD: one year on, I lay out clearly how Elon Musk FRS has breached the @royalsociety.org’s code of conduct, why the Society’s failure to defend its values has been so damaging, & what they need do to recover their standing in the scientific community. occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2026/...
I am very happy that we again managed to invite two world-leading scientists as keynotes for the 6th Virtual @chembiotalks.bsky.social.
We are working on an exciting additional program. Stay tuned!
Mailing list: fd24.formdesk.com/universiteit...
#ChemSky #ChemBio #ChemBioTalks
We are looking for a postdoc to work on mechanisms of #RNA decay in cancer using #cryoEM with #nanobodies and #minibinders! Please RT
I agree, very reasonable to ask for that. Or at least a map file covering the ligand and its surroundings.
Do they provide PDB validation reports? Those have densities at least shown for the ligands and calculated from deposited.
"Migrants who came to the UK on skilled work visas in 2022-23 will make a net contribution of £47bn to the public finances over their lifetime, according to new estimates from the government’s Migration Advisory Committee."
Not surprising, but some observations (1/n)
www.ft.com/content/10da...
We are advertising for a Technician in Mammalian Cell Culture (Pharma collaboration) with the Merkle Group, to help generate and characterise human cellular models of obesity💊
Apply here: phar.cam.ac.uk/jobs
We agree, this is horrible - we need a holistic look at the whole city centre (not just the 'Civic Quarter') to better design routes for all modes of transport, beginning with walking, wheeling and cycling.
Car being driven on the wrong side of the road, overtaking standing queue.
A sure sign of Christmas coming to Cambridge when shoppers queue on Tennis Court Rd and some impatient drivers race against the oncoming traffic, usually cyclists, turning around a blind corner. Every year the same, a serious accident waiting to happen.
Cc. @camcycle.bsky.social
Congrats @emmabelcher96.bsky.social for a job superbly done! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Challenging and exciting project, tackled with skill and determination. What more can one hope for? 🙏🏻👍🏻
👇👇👇👇👇
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.
It's *scientific publishing*.
We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...
Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇
Cambridge Amgen Scholars Programme 2026 is now open. Great opportunity for undergrad students from UK and Europe to join Cambridge labs.
Happy hear from anyone interested in joining our group at @cambiochem.bsky.social
amgenscholars.bio.cam.ac.uk
Looking for an AMR-themed PhD project? Join us to investigate antibiotic tolerance in Staphylococcus aureus through a fully funded MRC DTP PhD studentship starting in September 2026.
This project is close collaboration with @kateduncan.bsky.social and @mycobacterium-ncl.bsky.social.
NEW from me:
Political hostility, high visa fees and (in the case of the UK) stagnant incomes are making the UK and US less attractive destinations for top international talent.
That steep decline in the appeal of moving to the US after 2016 is 👀
Flyer for a conference
📣 Save the date 📣
The next FASEB Science Research Conference on TGF-β Family in Development and Disease will take place:
July 26-30, 2026 in Porto, Portugal!
@faseborg.bsky.social
With Mythreye Karthikeyan @mythreye.bsky.social, Rosemary Akhurst and Andrew Hinck
web.cvent.com/event/af5f6d...
We just published: Why you should sequence your plasmids (and how to do it for free)
Through @GetGenome scientists in 100 countries can access free whole-plasmid sequencing —giving researchers the confidence to move their experiments forward.
medium.com/p/why-you-sh...
truth
The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?
That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience
A 🧵 1/n
The Bornelöv Group is seeking a Research Assistant to work on gene regulation using deep learning. This is an exciting opportunity to use AI-based methods to uncover the molecular mechanisms behind mRNA processing and fate. Apply here by 8 July 2025: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/51812/
FBLD 2025 | Final Call for Abstract Submissions!
Abstract submissions close this Friday, 27 June 2025.
Don't miss your chance to share your research with global experts at FBLD 2025. For more information go to: fbldconference.org/2025-abstrac...
I'm on BBC World Service later discussing how we're not going to get people cycling more just by encouraging them. I've not heard the edit, but hopefully they've used lots of the footage of me slagging off Swansea's car-first infrastructure as we cycled through the city www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...
www.ft.com/content/8778...
Kudos to Andrea Sella for taking a stand against @royalsociety.org’s inaction over Elon Musk FRS
Followed in the evening by Dine Hard
“The visa fees are so exceedingly high that it makes coming here very difficult for some people. We are fishing for the best scientists in the world. They want to come and work here because we are such an effective country at science, but if we have these high costs, they can and will go elsewhere.”
