Mike Morrison

Hi!👋 I made that silly, viral YouTube cartoon that helped 250,000 of you redesign your research poster. #betterposter v1 t.co/wyXhiP5CKl v2 t.co/q1g4SsSrlS I use science & design to improve your experience with scientific articles, posters, publishing — and beyond!🧑‍🚀 Mission: youtu.be/WBjhxjWDiHw

Anybody else old enough to remember dotcoms appending "e" to every company name? Feel like we're seeing the same with "Blah blah AI"?

Lead UX designer, @mikemorrison.bsky.social also studies interface design for scientists. He used @curvenote.com SCMS to host his own journal, Science UX: real DOIs, Google Scholar indexing, + more, published in one command. Same platform for a single researcher or a large publisher. Here's how 🎥

Always enjoy @mikemorrison.bsky.social videos. :) Take a look at him talking about his new journal, ScienceUX!!

Fighting over authorship order is so 1800s. Let's build an IMDB for science with CRediT Roles: youtu.be/Sq0710DfvMw

Can we make ePoster presentations actually readable at a distance? Conferences are (happily) starting to let you use slides and/or zoom-in. Watch for good/bad examples: youtu.be/YJGEgv_jPqE

I was reconnecting my AirPods to my PC like 10 times a day via settings until I got frustrated enough to search (and find!) this fantastic little app: magicpods.app Posting because I feel genuinely over-benefited paying $2 for this much time savings and want to help the creator out.

Wanna help improve science with better design? Join us in the ScienceUX community! Here's a tour of the projects you could join: youtu.be/XVM86B8VNz0 Discord invite: discord.gg/q5r2W2Hs2

Ever had to scroll up in a scientific article to find where some abbereviation was defined like Jargon Word (JW)? No more! youtu.be/E_0yEzIM5ac

Good conversations at @force11.bsky.social FORCE2026 this week. Thanks to everyone who came to Curvenote's @mikemorrison.bsky.social session on "Connected Publishing" More to come on Curvenote Reader...... #Force2026 #Curvenote

🚀 Today we’re launching Curvenote Reader Curvenote Reader transforms existing research into connected, web-native reading experiences layered onto the systems repositories and publishers already use. No rebuilds. No workflow disruption. → curvenote.com/products/rea...

Wrote the missing "how to wrap a JS viz in an anywidget" tutorial for @curvenote articles opensci.dev/articles/con... includes a companion repo

@mikemorrison.bsky.social 's vision for #ScientificArticles www.youtube.com/shorts/76gEY... builds upon @worrydream.com who asked us to lean into how alive the #web can be with data, and to 'stop drawing dead fish' www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfyt... Both authors are essential #ATscience viewing!

Apparently when you listen to star wars music on Spotify, the play bar turns into a lightsaber?!

Excited to talk about modular science, Open Exchange Architecture, @curvenote.com and @continuous.foundation tomorrow. Will be a fun day learning all that is going on in this space. 🚀🚀

Just made my first post from @curvenote.com to my PDS using the AT Proto variant of OXA 🚀🚀🚀. was still working on this when @row1.ca was giving his #ATScience talk yesterday. More about OXA and links to the PDS record in my post. opensci.dev/articles/hel...

For those of you who've published 30+ scientific papers, how confident are you that you could recognize each one by the first 5 words of the title?

I used to judge the government in Terminator for giving full control over to Skynet. After 2 days with Clawbot, I kind of get it.

Can you spot the overlapping panels? Tell me which ones! The first three correct answers (either by illustration or a good description) will win that shiny Emoji Award. It will look so good on your resume! #ImageForensics

The scientific article is the album. What is a song?

Scientific publishing is still organized around bundles built for print. We use music’s shift from albums to streaming to argue why access and unbundling aren’t enough. Shared standards are the missing layer for reusable, trustworthy science. articles.continuousfoundation.org/articles/how...

In a digital world, we are increasingly constrained by boundaries that no longer make sense. In a world of artificial intelligence, what does the bundle prevent us from seeing?

When you submit a paper to a conference/journal how do you find all your coauthors' emails to enter/copy into the form? 1. Make authors organize their info all in one place before submission to make it easier 2. Copy-paste from our last email thread together 3. Other?

Who would like google scholar to give us a sleek "Your Year in Citations" replay like music apps do?

Instead of every app in your life doubling monthly prices for AI features, would you rather just hook apps to your OpenAI account and pay a 'gas bill' based on your usage?

You should be able to respond to reviewer comments with memes to liven up the peer review process.

Play a little game and choose the right icon for each role in science. Play our CRediT Roles icon game/survey, and help make scientific authorship clearer and more accessible! creditsurvey.sciux.org #OpenScience #ScienceUX

How we've started doing weekly meetings in our #ScienceUX volunteer lab: Presenting new designs to each other in a virtual scientific conference hall. Come join the discord if you want to help improve science with better design! discord.gg/rNjNv2Ss

I've been on the road so I'm behind the times—but if you wanted to destroy US science, I can think of no more expedient action. Blatant unconstitutionality aside, fuck this backwards forwards and sideways. www.science.org/content/article/u-s-congress-considers-sweeping-ban-chinese-collaborations

Play a little game and choose the right icon for each role in science. Play our CRediT Roles icon game/survey, and help make scientific authorship clearer and more accessible! creditsurvey.sciux.org #OpenScience #ScienceUX

Hu & Bentler (1999) with >130k citations selected for huge citation and moderate actual impact--see Nils' rationale that a lot of citation use is unthinking or to stop thinking. What then is the prototype of prototypes for the moderate citation impact and moderate actual impact?

#SciComm community, I can use your help! Please share: 1. Any resources or publications about developing a hands-on tabletop science outreach activity. 2. Any personal tips & tricks based on your experiences running this type of activities! Thanks!

What are some other "actually kind and not evil" software companies you've had a pleasant experience with? I'll start: @blackmagicdesign.bsky.social video editor gives so much for free Eagle.cool is DAM perfect for $30 lifetime @obsidian.md - Happily pay $8 for cloud sync on their free app.

PSA: Last week, Affinity Studio (major Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop alternative) went completely 'free forever'. Pro design software, now accessible to all PhD students. May start recommending this in my workshops. www.affinity.studio/graphic-desi...

I see a huge opportunity for how the AT Protocol could reshape academic publishing. Imagine researchers publishing continuously and atomically — before, during, and after research projects — in public connected continuous streams of discovery and insight.

PI's of BSky: If you had to guess, What percentage of 2nd+ year PhD students in your lab have an @orcid.org?

Last week at #ICSB2025, we shared how #MCP can make LLM-based agents reliable for #SystemsBiology. MCP was barely known there. All the more reason for Cracking Shells to exist: simplifying onboarding for researchers. #AIForScience

@mikemorrison.bsky.social will be sharing how #scientists and #SciComm folks can combine design and psychology principles to create engaging visual science communication tools. Join this Friday, Oct 17 @ 2pm ET for this FREE webinar. Sign up for Zoom link. waterwhys.org/seminar/fall...

We’re proud to launch our SCMS — a platform that turns data, code, and figures into living, connected research ready to share and build on. Read the announcement here → bit.ly/3KGqHK8

Looking forward to speaking at Water Whys on Friday about applying psychology & design to improve science communication!

Could use a few more participants in our study of scientific slide design. Got a sec to go through some example slides then rate them? 🙏 nimble.li/p9lxzlz9 As a bonus, you get to learn some random facts. #scienceUX

It's time to talk visual science communication again! @waterwhysua.bsky.social is back with unique conversations around visual science communication including @mikemorrison.bsky.social Oct. 17. Free talks every other Friday on Zoom start tomorrow. Register now waterwhys.org/seminar/fall... #SciComm

Big believer that posters are better than talks at conferences. After presentating my first #BetterPoster at #ESA2025, that has only been reinforced.

😍 So happy to see this. HHMI is going to create so much positive change in scientific publishing with this. Now that big funders are embracing the preprint, we can focus on upgrading the preprint to be better than the journal article ever was. Born #openacces makes so much possible.

better than average science day? • sperm whale eating a giant squid confirmed • HHMI policy: preprints as most important form of publication

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Across two studies, we found that short conversations with ChatGPT led climate sceptics to report lower confidence in their sceptical views and small increases in pro-environmental intentions. You can read the article here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...