On one of the courses I teach, I tell students about a project in which we were unable to replicate key findings of a prior peer-reviewed paper from another lab (published in a well-respected journal) even though we had high power to detect claimed effects & a much larger sample than they had...1/n
How do you know if your data and scripts are FAIR and your analyses reproducible? Check out the @sortee.bsky.social guidelines written by @joelpick.bsky.social and @eivimeycook.bsky.social, now published in @peercomjournal.bsky.social.
Very nice guidelines for such an important issue!
Great to see this published, thanks to Joel and Ed for organising! 👏
It’s been nice to contribute to coming together as a data editing community, to agree on ideals - and hopefully this will translate into journal policy change in future ✍️
🧵 New paper out today in @peercommunityin.bsky.social Journal!
@joelpick.bsky.social et al. introduce the first standardised guidelines for data & code quality control in #ecology & #evolutionarybiology, on behalf of @sortee.bsky.social 🔓
doi.org/10.24072/pcj...
#OpenScience #EEB [1/5]
2 - Gold Open Access - same publishing process as above. The difference is that when an article is accepted for publication, the author/s or funder/s pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). The final version of the published article is then free to read for everyone. The APC to publish Gold Open Access in Nature is £9390.00/$12850.00/€10850.00.
Why are we still spending tens of thousands of $$$ on APC for non-society journals like Nature?
Wouldn’t that money be better spent at society journals at least? We are doing ourselves a disservice by continuing to participate in this madness.
You don’t need a paper in these journals to succeed.
If you currently do not have a reproducible workflow where you can share data and code where possible, I expect you will soon not be able to publish in good journals.
Beyond being best practice, journals will use this to identify papers written by AI.
Plan a new project accordingly.
Specific details about PLOS Biology's mandatory code-sharing policy
In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication.
We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #code-sharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing.
May be nice to cut-out the box for reference
plos.io/47dPeOW
🧪
97% of the papers archived the data but only 35% archived the code.
Most people are writing code but not sharing it. Time to bring up this again: scispace.com/pdf/publish-... (and if the code isn't good enough yet, maybe it's too early to publish the paper)
#openscience #reproducibility #ecopubs
📣 JOBS!!! We're looking for new colleagues in the School of Biology @bioscienceleeds.bsky.social - two associate profs (plant sci and animal biology) and a lecturer (ecology/zoology)...
jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
jobs.leeds.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
A point on LLMs creating entire papers that I don't think I've seen before.
If* LLMs can create an entire paper from scratch, this doesn't mean science ends or something. It just means what counts as "a paper" has to change. We'll jump up a level of abstraction or something.
This is a common reply to concerns about GenAI research as if it were just another computational tool that saves us times from tedious tasks and whose accuracy can be rigorously quantified.
It is not.
GenAI research poses at least 2 serious problems... /n
Yeah, I really can't stress enough that AI code assistants royally fuck up statistical analyses. And they do it with absolute confidence.
Given the recent spicy #rstats threads, an important reminder:
There's no single right way to code
If it works for you, that's all that matters really
Be good to your fellow coders
@martamiori.bsky.social and I have been writing, since 2024, about why Labour's 'Reform' challenge and emphasis was based on a misunderstanding of Labour's vote. Here for anyone interested: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...
Someone should make a Simpson's meme for maximum relevance. In the meantime:
This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.
It does not.
It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.
🧵 1/
We're a little late for #LoveData26 but it's never too late to introduce our new data editors! These folks will guide our authors' compliance with ESA's Open Research Policy.
Now recommended on @peercommunityin.bsky.social!
ecology.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec...
TADA! Guidelines to Improve Code Sharing by @joelpick.bsky.social @eivimeycook.bsky.social et al!
bsky.app/profile/eivi...
📣 We are looking for others to replicate our work!
🔗 More information: nanobubbles.hypotheses.org/replication-...
What could this look like? Some potential guidelines:
1. Try to use no more than 100 words in the whole poster (outside of text inside of tables and figures).
2. Make the figures giant.
3. Present *way less information.*
4. Ask a question on the poster to engage the audience.
With everything going on in the world, what better time than now to re-up my thoughts (that is, rant) about scientific posters? (Thread!)
Sian Henley and I have just had a NERC grant funded, looking at variation in Souther Ocean diatom traits under fluctuating light regimes. If you are a fearless experimentalist interested in working with us as a postdoc on this 3 year project, come chat with me at Ocean Sciences in Glasgow next week!
Led by my talented PhD student @justine-armg.bsky.social we’re running a #meta-analysis of #cross-sex-genetic-correlations in fitness components.
If you have unpublished data or know of studies that might not appear in a systematic search, please reach out, we’d love to include them!
Please share!
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
📢📢📢Lectureships at Bristol!📢📢📢
We're hiring 3 x lecturers (=assistant professor) in Biological Sciences, across the discipline.
Great department, great colleagues, great building, great city
Details here:
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...
This is particularly weird because most of Open Science boils down to: just be honest. Write down in your paper what you actually did. Seems a rather low bar for any science, but apparently pointing this out touches upon a very sensitive issue for some fellow academics.
This highlights important differences.
If the LaTeX code is wrong, it'll (nearly always) be obvious. Garbled table -> try again.
And ultimately, it doesn't matter in the same way. Nice docs are nice, but people don't die from misformated bullet point
If analysis code is wrong, it's not obvious.
New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.
