Tim

Out now, a deep meditation on how we get from data collection to a richer understanding of biology: "The aim is only this: to protect the seam between doing and thinking, so that neither experimental rigor nor theoretical depth is euthanized to the pressure for rapid output."

A very huge/syncitial congratulations to the authors. Reviewers really appreciated this work!

“One of the things I like best about being an editor at the JCB is the partnership between professional and academic editors.”— Mark Peifer (@peiferlabunc.bsky.social), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. JCB is your partner for peer review. Learn more 👉 hubs.la/Q04zW3kL0

Comments to this are a shitshow. Essentially xkcd.com/927/. Honestly why did ORCID not succeed the way ror.org and to a great extent Crossref did? I'm sure there are many reasons but I do think they made a fundamental strategic error by refusing to own the researcher profile.

We have published 3 papers through @reviewcommons.org The most notable difference was always how the manuscripts were evaluated for what they were rather than for the journal in which they were eventually published. That's simply how peer review should be!

Thanks to Russ Vought for exposing this woke research

Needed to consult my editorial assistant on these critical reviewer comments.

Most researchers treat impact factor like an objective measure of some natural law that just flows directly from journal performance. Approximately zero researchers know that IF is "owned" by a single company, and that many other measures of journal performance might be used instead.

Today's seminar speaker at Rockefeller was Svante Pääbo, who was introduced with the appropriate list of accolades/prizes. Including the Time Magazine top 100 people in 2007, shared with Barack Obama and Oprah. He began his talk by telling us he also shared the Times list with Osama Bin Laden 😂

And then publish your negative results! bsky.app/profile/timi...

In 2022 we published an open-source hardware, software, and protocols ecosystem for repurposing sequencers as automated fluidics coupled imaging instruments. On Oct 13 @yougotkunal.bsky.social & @nygenome.org will host a workshop on current applications. Register here: regenseq.github.io/meeting/

Human vs murine IL-2?? If you are a mouse T cell, prevailing wisdom says it doesn't matter. But papers on IL-2 species specificity are ~30 years old. Here, Brian Sheridan and colleagues found a modest but persistent survival advantage for murine IL-2 👇 www.life-science-alliance.org/content/9/12...

"All corners of academia will soon be flooded with AI-generated research....Maths and CS go first because their entire output is symbol manipulation...Biology comes later not because biologists are cleverer but because the rate-limiting step is physical" giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

Immunology journal editor (in a webinar) "reviewers spend 1-2 hours to write a quality review" Seems kind of low to me? Is that true, immunologists?

found at ucsf

It's Peer Review Week!! The one week a year when I actually read the peer reviews at LSA 😌 (this was a joke) But seriously this week I worked with a 1st time peer reviewer to significantly improve their comments which were initially not really appropriate. A win for us all!

Congrats Max @maxkrummel.bsky.social and coauthor @danmucida.bsky.social !!

We are all watching this experiment! Whatever the outcome, Biology Open deserves credit for testing this out. In the meantime, I am confident that every researcher who is shouting "pay peer reviewers!!" is of course sending all of their own manuscripts to this journal 😉

Do you think a seminar talk should be citable the way a paper is? Do you think oral presentations should be tracked and ranked the way clicks and citations on papers are? In this case I really worry about attention deficit disorder 😅

I need to hear from the people about italicizing "in vitro" and "in vivo" in manuscripts: Should @lsajournal.org stick to the Council of Science Editors and various others' conventions and force authors to remove italics for these? I have heard that this request makes some authors unhappy...

We are hiring! 🌟 Dept of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago is searching for a tenure-track assistant professor. It's a broad search: we want great colleagues doing serious biological work at the molecular scale. Join us! apply.interfolio.com/191981 bcmb.uchicago.edu

Here in lovely Woods Hole for the annual meeting @sgpweb.bsky.social, where I am delighted to chat about both @lsajournal.org and @jgp.org A great theme this year on excitability in human reproduction!! (My congrats to Sue on her impressive puddle)

Final call for early registration! 📢 The 2026 Triangle Cytoskeleton Meeting is coming up on September 21st. 🧬 Early Registration ($80): Ends Aug 24th 🧬 Late Registration ($100): Ends Sept 14th Sign up now to lock in your spot. Visit our website for more info trianglecytoskeleton.com

The Risca lab at @rockefeller.edu asked what the hell is going on with this weird flavor of senescence and SASP that can arise from CDK4/6 inhibition. Important implications for treating tumors with this powerful therapy, now out at @lsajournal.org www.rockefeller.edu/news/40361-c...

This is why editors want to attend conferences btw

🚨🚨🚨 #Editor Job alert! I’m not an editor, but if I decided to pursue career in scientific #publishing, then Company of Biologists is the organisation I’d most want to work for, & @jcellsci.bsky.social is the journal I’d want to work at 🤩 Details + link to job description in the link 👇

I’ll try 🫡

"7 days after the medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction" www.science.org/content/arti...

Dear microbiome enthusiasts: I'm excited to be moving my lab to New York University this fall (& the NYU Institute for Engineering Health); with joint-appointment @isbscience.org I'm hiring a postdoc @ NYU to look at diet-driven evolution in the gut: apply.interfolio.com/189980 Please share! 🦠🤓

They've been playing us for absolute fools. 8 basic sounds?? Completely derivative, no creativity whatsoever.

"Please address all comments by Reviewer 21"

People say scientists are serious but marine biologists will spend hours quietly sitting around tables drawing on styrofoam cups and then tying said cups to deep sea submarines Because ocean pressure will squeeze the air from the cups And we are but human & we want tiny cup

Congrats on this important babysitting adventure!

This collection explores emergent phenomena in #CellBiology incl. how cellular events are rapidly coordinated by waves of chemical & electrical signals, how tissue patterning is governed at the cellular level & how cellular interfaces guide cellular migration & morphology rupress.org/jcb/collecti...

gonna start talking like this to my boss

It puts the journal decision letter in the basket

As absolutely bat shit, crazy as this sounds, we should ask ourselves why an author might make this assumption. If you are an editor, could an author make this assumption about your journal? If you are an author, does the editor give any signal that they read the reviews?