Notices by Björn Brembs (brembs@mastodon.social)

In some meetings, you wear a red band around your arm, in others, you bring your red basecap.

#uspol #USPolitics

If your buddy becomes an editor at a Nature journal, your chances of publishing a Nature paper more than double:

"For each additional original article published in the two years before the editor’s appointment, these authors had 161% more chances to publish another original article in this journal after the editor’s appointment"

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0322012

#academicchatter #publishing #openscience

It is more than just a warning sign when two experts on fascism (Snyder and Stanley) leave the US citing political developments - it's the canary fleeing the coalmine:

https://dailynous.com/2025/03/25/stanley-from-yale-to-toronto/

When people like these leave, you know it's bad.

#uspol #academicchatter

If science in the US is to survive, the opposite must happen: every single grant proposal must include as many of the "forbidden" words as possible:

"National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research."

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/nih-grants-mrna-vaccines-trump-administration-hhs-rfk/

Just in case anybody needed a reminder of where this is going.

"Most big science publishers are based in Europe, but a huge percentage of their revenue comes from the U.S. If the Trump administration demanded that these publishers block unapproved publications from the U.S., would they stand and fight?"

https://www.thetransmitter.org/policy/science-must-step-away-from-nationally-managed-infrastructure/

Of course they wouldn't! We've seen them roll over for much less, e.g.:

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2014/04/resigning-from-frontiers/

That was 11 years ago and things have changed for the worse since then.

#openscience #openaccess

Indeed, @neuralreckoning is spot on:
"start building new multi-country organizations, designed from the start to be community-run and resilient. A coalition of university #libraries could be ideally placed to lead this effort, as they already have vast experience building for and supporting access to scientific data and publications"

https://www.thetransmitter.org/policy/science-must-step-away-from-nationally-managed-infrastructure/

So who needs to do what to make it happen?
Once they are identified, a targeted campaign is required to get them to do what's right.

This boggles my mind:

In the 1980s and 90s, universities just pulled thousands of kilometers of cables, installed routers and software - just so they could have web servers and give everyone at their institution an email account.

Today, the best most of them can do is find some arbitrary Mastodon instance somewhere else and get one single account.

Imagine every university having just a single email address, e.g.

my-university@apple.com

🤦♂️

#academicchatter

Oh wow! Everyone needs ot see and spread the slides of @jekely 's #openscience talk:

https://jekelylab.github.io/ELTE_Open_Science_28Jan2025.html#/title-slide

#opendata #openaccess #science #academicchatter

"I didn't think there was anything left for publishers to monetize (after having authors acquire the funding, do the research, write the paper, do the peer review, and correct the page proofs for free while they take in all the profits), but here I stand corrected," he continued, adding that the "research brief" promised in the package "is essentially the abstract that you're writing anyway usually."

https://futurism.com/springer-nature-ai-media-kit

Only 12 signatures needed to reach 2k signatures urging univeristies to leave X:

https://openpetition.de/Unis4Mastodon

Only four days left to sign!

Help us reach this milestone by spreading the word!

#academicchatter #academis

By now, most decent people have left Musk's Nazi Chatroom and some have even written about it, e.g.:

https://www.publix.de/en/news/exit-is-our-only-hope

However, #academia appears to be a little slow on the uptake, despite the grandiose words in their mission statements:

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2024/12/by-their-actions-you-shall-know-them/

The petition we have started to spur universities into action is nearly at the end:

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/open-letter-to-the-german-rectors-conference-hrk-on-the-use-of-social-media

Can you sign it and push it beyond 2k signatures?

#academicchatter

By their actions you shall know them

Universities worldwide currently face a pivotal choice: should they contribute to building a global infrastructure for exchange, science, and discourse, free from the control of oligarchs, to promote democracy, human rights, and digital participation? Or should they continue advertising on private networks, hoping for clicks and marginally increased student enrollment? The Fediverse serves as a litmus test for universities globally:…

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2024/12/by-their-actions-you-shall-know-them/

If you haven't checked out mastodon.academy yet, now is a good time.

Must-read on surveillance publishing:

"A few companies with dominance over academic publishing have been able to capture and use surplus value created through the publishing lifecycle. This extraction—of academic labour, of data, of information—is reinvested into their proprietary data analytics products."

https://cjal.ca/index.php/capal/article/view/43293

#openscience #libraries

"Es kann eben nicht ausgeschlossen werden, dass Elon Musk morgen #BlueSky kauft. Aber das Mastodon-Netzwerk kann niemand kaufen."

https://www.riffreporter.de/de/gesellschaft/aktionsbuendnis-mastodon-wissenschaft-hochschulen-x-twitter-abkehr

Link zur Petition:
https://www.openpetition.de/petition/blog/appell-an-die-hochschulrektorenkonferenz-zur-nutzung-sozialer-medien#petition-main

#unisinsfediverse

[The academic publishers now] "not only provide tools, they also collect user data. They log everything a researcher does, every keystroke."

https://ukrant.nl/magazine/elseviers-stranglehold-on-academia-how-publishers-get-rich-from-our-data/?lang=en

This is not emphasized nearly enough: when ideology clashes with science, "neutral" science means condoning the abuse of science.

"Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way."

https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/scientific-american-loses-its-bold-leader

@BorisBarbour @pluralistic

Precisely.
Why people with enough neurons to form a synapse who leave X go to BlueSky will forever remain a mystery to me.

@cian @BorisBarbour @pluralistic

Really? That's it? To me, this sounds a lot like:

"sure, there is no water in the Namib either, but at least it's not the Sahara! Doesn't that count as an improvement? Oh and now I have a lot of thirsty people with me in the Namib, when I would have to drink water with so much fewer people outside of deserts."

Sorry, but I can't make heads nor tail of this. My interest to go over there and interact with people whose minds operate like this is quite low.