Notices by Björn Brembs (brembs@mastodon.social), page 2

@cian @BorisBarbour @pluralistic

I study learning and memory (in invertebrate animals). I guess part of it is my bewilderment as to how many triels some people need to actually learn something 🤣

Then again, when email came, had there been only GMail initially, some people would probably still today struggle to understand what they would need a private and a work email for. 😆

For really no reason at all 😇 here's why I find the user experience on #Mastodon better than in that Nazi Chatroom when it was still called "Twitter":

- 500+ characters
- post editing
- follow hashtags
- better s/n ratio
- no ads

Plus, https://quintsns.pianeta.uno/ does a pretty good job at replacing paper.li

So I wouldn't go back, even if someone resurrected Twitter. Now, FriendFeed on the other hand... 😆

@pluralistic says it best, why #BlueSky is no alternative:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

@mloxton @pluralistic

Pretty much how I feel and why I think scholarship is the best place to adopt the Fediverse, see e.g.:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207

We even started a petition to the German Rector's Conference to leave X and support Mastodon instead:

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

The consequences of quantitative research assessment today:

- Impact factor: fake data, irreproducibility, et al.
- h-index: citation cartels, paper mills et al.

So sure, yes, let's think of yet another external motivation to incentivize researchers to cut corners: welcome the s-index!

https://www.thetransmitter.org/open-neuroscience-and-data-sharing/the-s-index-challenge-develop-a-metric-to-quantify-data-sharing-success/

🤦♀️

Scientific American saying it like it is:
"The Supreme Court’s Contempt for Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-courts-contempt-for-facts-is-a-betrayal-of-justice/

Now that's a long overdue initiative! Please help spread it!

Public Money? Public Code! - FSFE-Tube

https://media.fsfe.org/w/7cH6EATpmPwaMsEZN8vfyj

Trying out the #openscience group @open_science and seeing if we can get a significant share of the open science community to participate.

If you haven't already, please consider signing our petition to the German Rectors Conference, urging them to transition all university social media presence in Germany to #mastodon and the #fediverse. You can find the petition here:

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

Boosts are greatly appreciated!

@pfefferle

Thanks, that's what I thought, I just wasn't sure I had understood it properly. I think I'll unistall the plug-in again and search for one that simply posts the links to Mastodon for me.
I'm also considering setting up my own instance as a subdomain and then migrate there from here, but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.

Thanks again!

@pfefferle

I have a question: I have a WP blog with the plug-in:

https://bjoern.brembs.net/

Somehow, I managed to create two Mastodon users that post different posts:

@bjoern
@brembs@bjoern.brembs.net

How can I adjust it such that these posts all shw up under this account instead? The way I understand it, it is not possible? If so then what would be the use case for the plug-in?

How the death of Twitter and the continuing enshittification of X is reviving the academic blogosphere:

https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2024/01/08/return-to-and-of-the-ecology-blogosphere/

and

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/01/08/dynamic-ecology-is-back/

#academicchatter

I have co-signed a petition directed at the German Rectors Conference to convince them to migrate all #university social media presence to #Mastodon:

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

Please consider signing it!

Where are our rich scholarly societies when you need them? Oh, yes, I forgot, they are busy counting their publication income!

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/11/30/the-fediverse-is-an-opportunity-learned-societies-cant-ignore/

#mastodon #openscience #publishing

Maybe scholarly societies have taken the instruction to follow the money too literally? There now are societies that make 83% of their nearly $700 million in revenue from publishing (American Chemical Society). Or 88% of $130 million (American Psychological Association). Or 91% of $5 million (Biochemical Society). In essence, societies like these (there are hundreds predominantly in STEM subjects) are publishers first and societies second.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/11/30/the-fediverse-is-an-opportunity-learned-societies-cant-ignore/

#mastodon #openaccess

YES!
This is precisely what every university (and scholarly society!!) should be doing: have their own instance and drop X like a hot potato:

"an instance has been created [... ] on university servers, which is open to the university's organizational units. The active use of X will be significantly reduced."

https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/newsroom/2023/university-of-innsbruck-focuses-on-mastodon/

We detail all the arguments about precisely why that must happen here:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207

Finally! For years I have used some of my talks to warn of disappearing #data. Now there is a study quantifying the risk:

"Disappearing #repositories -- taking an #infrastructure perspective on the long-term availability of #researchdata"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06712

by @dorothearrr

#openscience #opendata

Wonderful! @hildabast writes:

"It’s exciting to join in the growth and success of truly social media – media that doesn’t trap us in commercially-owned spaces that are extractive and manipulative. It feels worth investing in a community for the longterm when you know they can follow you if you move to a different neighborhood."

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/08/20/how-is-science-twitters-mastodon-migration-panning-out/

#science

This is how you do #openaccess:
"At an estimated cost of €30 (US$34) per publication, Psicológica can increase its output without incurring substantial extra costs."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02315-z

And now protocols.io goes the way of Mendely:

https://www.protocols.io/workspaces/protocolsio-news/news/the-next-chapter-for-protocolsio

If you don't want your personal data being sold or otherwise misused, stop using protocols.io!

Bit by bit, every useful tool in science is getting killed by the surveillance publishers.

#openscience

Many scholars are leaving Twitter for #Mastodon, a public, decentralized alternative, impervious to private take-over:

https://www.science.org/content/article/musk-reshapes-twitter-academics-ponder-taking-flight

Scholarly organizations are already supporting this migration:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00486-3

and

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

There are analogous solutions for another public good in private hands: journals. There are even levers the scholarly community could pull to incentivize an analogous migration:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634

What are we waiting for?