Björn Brembs

Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform.

Should you trust Elsevier?

More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the blog of journalist Jan-Martin Wiarda.

 Front cover of

the now-vanished

 Australasian Journal of Bone &amp; Joint Medicine

. Source: Scan from the-scientist.com website

The trinity of failures

According to a recent study, employee surveillance is rampant in today’s corporate work environment. This study documents how, often under the pretense of cybersecurity or risk analysis (sort of like academic publishers, actually), companies analyze the behavioral data they collect from their employees to help them make “evidence-led”, i.e., algorithmic employment decisions.

Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?

There are regular discussions among academics as to who should be the prime mover in infrastructure reform. Some point to the publishers to finally change their business model. Others claim that researchers need to vote with their feet and change how they publish. Again others find that libraries should just stop subscribing to journals and use the saved money for a modern publishing system.

Who’s responsible for the lack of action?

Since cOAlition S is asking for recommendations from the community for the implementation of their Plan S, I have also chipped in. In their feedback form, they ask two questions, to which I have answered with the replies below.

Providing recommendations for Plan S implementation

It’s now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access movement by suggesting in his “subversive proposal” in 1994 that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the internet:  Since then, we have been waiting on the behavior of scholars to change, such that all our works indeed become accessible.

After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift?

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI‘s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58):    Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and standards behind the functionalities I have been asking for

Why academic journals need to go

These days, many academic publishers can be considered mere Pinos: ‘Publishers in name only’. Instead of making scholarly work, commonly paid for by the public, public, as the moniker ‘publisher’ would imply, in about 80% of the cases, they put them behind a paywall.

The scholarly commons: from profiteering to servicing

Academic publishers in general and Elsevier in particular have a reputation for their ruthless profiteering, using professional negotiators pitting hapless librarians against their own faculty during journal subscription negotiations.

Why can Elsevier keep insulting scholars without consequences?

Few insect behaviors are more iconic than the proverbial moths circling the lamps at night. Artist: Dave McKean  These observations are prime examples of the supposedly stereotypic insect responses to external stimuli. In contrast, in our new paper that just appeared today, we describe experiments suggesting that insects appear to make a value-based decision before approaching the light.

Why did the moth fly into the flame?

Why our Open Data project worked, (and how Decorum can allay our fears of Open Data).  I am honored to Guest Post on Björn’s blog and excited about  the interest in our work from Björn’s response to Dorothy Bishop’s first post. As corresponding author on our paper, I will provide more context to our successful Open Data experience with Björn’s and Casey’s labs.

Guest post: Why our Open Data project worked

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?

A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because that would risk their and their employees’ jobs. Librarians, equally correctly, argue that they would cancel subscriptions if faculty wouldn’t complain about ensuing access issues.

Practical roads to infrastructure reform

Around 2005, German politicians decided on a plan to circumvent a newly created amendment to the German constitution that prevents federal funds from supporting state-owned institutions such as universities.

Data show “excellence initiative” was a massive failure – help stop it

Three years ago, representatives of libraries, publishers and scholars all agreed that academic publishers don’t really add any value to scholarly articles. Last week, I interpreted Sci-Hub potentially being a consequence of scholars having become tired after 20 years of trying to wrestle their literature from the publishers’ stranglehold by small baby-steps and through negotiations and campaigning alone.

Academic publishers: stop access negotiations

tl;dr:
 
 Data from thousands of non-retracted articles indicate that experiments published in higher-ranking journals are less reliable than those reported in ‘lesser’ journals.

Vox health reporter Julia Belluz has recently covered the reliability of peer-review.

Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis

 et al.

entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits

The data clearly show that publications in

 Cell

,

 Nature

or

 Science

(

 CNS

for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is so small that it is practically negligible.

No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine

By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in

 Science Magazine

last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless.

How embarrassing was the ‘journal sting’ for Science Magazine?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.

Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science

Flashback: The brain creates something out of nothing

Scientists as social parasites?

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from April 19, 2011:

Flashback: Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat!

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted these two on February 24, 2013:

The first one is a TED talk by Michael Dickinson on how flies fly: and the second one is on recording from fly visual neurons during flight and non-flight.

SummerScienceVideo: fruit fly research

Flashback: ‘stimulus-response’ concept based on artifacts?

This post was originally published on the London School of Economics “Impact of Social Sciences” blog, on July 30, 2013:

In various fields of scholarship, scholars accrue reputation via the proxy of the containers they publish their articles in. In most if not all fields, scholarly journals are ranked in a hierarchy of prestige.

Solutions to the looming crisis in science

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I want to use this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This is the first post in this series, just to see if it works and what needs to be tweaked.

Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning

This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968:  On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, even before the scholarly literature was able to fully implement the technology he invented, 45 years and counting.

The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks

It might just save your life (via Upturned Microscope):    BTW, even if your life is not at stake, someone else’s may be. So you should publish your results if you are sure something definitely will not work, for instance in F1000 Research, where you can publish negative results for free until August 31, 2013. Your colleagues will be grateful.

One more reason to publish negative results

I have now posted the job ads for the PostDoc position in our lab at

 Nature

,

 Science

, SfN and FENS.

PostDoc opportunity in our lab now advertized

Trial and error is a successful problem-solving strategy not only in humans but throughout evolution. How do nervous systems generate novel, creative trials and how are errors incorporated into already existing experiences in order to improve future trials?

Come and do research with us!

This is our first poster at this year’s SfN meeting in San Diego. It’s about decision-making in fruit flies. We find a probabilistic form of decision-making that suggests that without understanding the mechanisms behind this fundamental uncertainty, we will never fully understand decision-making. Clicking on the image will let you download the PDF Version of the poster.

Do flies in groups make individual choices?

Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any further disruptions.

Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions

Scholarly journals, on the face of it, emerged in the 17

 th

century as a medium to facilitate communication of scientific discoveries among interested scholars. In the 21

 st

century, it’s not all that different: researchers form communities around topics in which they share a common interest: Journal of Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Neonatology, Journal of Economics or the British Educational Research Journal.

Academic publishers and competition

This anecdote made my day today. On a

 Drosophila

researcher mailinglist, someone asked if anybody on the list had access to the Landes Bioscience journal ‘Fly‘. I replied by wondering that if #icanhazpdf on Twitter didn’t work, the days of ‘Fly’ are probably counted, with nobody subscribing.

#icanhazpdf more public than a publication?

While our own manuscript on journal rank is almost through the peer-review process, this morning I received several messages announcing the DORA (

 San Francisco declaration on research Assessment

), which I signed immediately.

Official call for an end to journal rank

Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the

 FoxP

locus of

 Drosophila

with anatomical and behavioral characterizations of the various transgenic lines she has created.

With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19

The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their grant recipients only publish in certain venues under certain liberal licensing schemes.

Does academic freedom entail exemption from spending rules?

Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.

Maybe try another kind of mandate?

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as

 Nature

or

 Science

. After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data

The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” boycott against Elsevier and even that drew less than 15,000 measly signatures, a drop in the bucket with 970,000 board members, reviewers and authors working for Elsevier largely for free.

In support of subscripton cancellations

In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions.  At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption is very reasonable, as many more eyes see each paper in such journals and the motivation to shoot down such high-profile papers might also be higher.

Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?

Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accepted manuscript public?

What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly

 Drosophila

(more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.

Why use fruit flies to study a gene involved in language?

Academic publishers have been parasitizing the public purse for long enough now. Steffen Böhm, director of the Essex Sustainability Institute, said it best: In his article, he mentions the successful SciELO project in South America. In a lot of ways, SciELO (scielo.org) is quite close to what I have been arguing for: SciELO means “Scientific Electronic

 Library

Online” and is supported by the Brazilian and Chilean government.

Cut out the parasitic middle men!

This year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior (WCALB) will be on one of my oldest and most central research projects, the commonalities and differences between operant and classical conditioning.

Almost 80 years on, progress on operant and classical conditioning

In which potatoes in France are like high-ranking journals in science

This is the tweetlog covering July 3-5: Interesting! We find something similar in flies: Live fast, die young: Long-lived mice are less active https://feedly.com/k/16RDz21 It smells fishy: Copper prevents fish from avoiding danger https://feedly.com/k/12gw14F @

 biocs

@

 google

Yes!

Tweetlog: neuroscience and #openaccess

After almost 25 years since Stevan Harnad’s “subversive proposal“, now, finally, scholars and the public have a range of avenues at their disposal to access nearly every scholarly article. Public access, while not the default, has finally arrived. Granted, while all of the current options are considered legal for the

 reader

, not all

 providers

of scholarly literature conform to every law in every country.

With the access issue temporarily solved, what now?

Amazing bead chain experiment

Random Science Video: The value of fly research

There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 per hour for graduate students and US$350 per hour for faculty. Taking a conservative US$200 as an easy, lower-bound estimate for, say, a post-doc hour seems to cover most cases.

How about paying extra for peer-review?

No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded science accessible to the public.

No Evilsevier DEAL!

The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA.

German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?

tl;dr:


 Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material.

Replacing the prestige signal

Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying mainly on corporate publishers with monopoly status.

Academic publishing – market or collectivization?

There have been repeated online discussions about my suggestion to libraries that now would be an excellent time to start cancelling subscriptions. Prime counter-argument is that librarians risked their jobs or at least face faculty backlash if they did that. Personally, I have witnessed many such cancellations and there has never been a riot or even a librarian reprimanded, let alone fired.

How to convince faculty to support subscription cancellations

Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years.

Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

Over the last decade or two, there have been multiple accounts of how publishers have negotiated the impact factors of their journals with the “Institute for Scientific Information” (ISI), both before it was bought by Thomson Reuters and after. This is commonly done by negotiating the articles in the denominator.

Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?

tl;dr:
 
 It is a waste to spend more than the equivalent of US$100 in tax funds on a scholarly article.

Collectively, the world’s public purse currently spends the equivalent of US$~10b every year on scholarly journal publishing. Dividing that by the roughly two million articles published annually, you arrive at an average cost per scholarly journal article of about US$5,000.

How much should a scholarly article cost the taxpayer?

Posting my reply to a review of our most recent grant proposal has sparked an online discussion both on Twitter and on Drugmonkey’s blog. The main direction the discussion took was what level of expertise to expect from the reviewers deciding over your grant proposal. This, of course, is highly dependent on the procedure by which the funding agency chooses the reviewers.

How to write your grant proposal?

Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion.

With more and more evaluations, assessments and quality control, the peer-review burden has skyrocketed in recent years.

Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it

This is a post written jointly by Nelson Lau from Brandeis and me, Björn Brembs. In contrast to Nelson’s guest post, which focused on the open data aspect of our collaboration, this one describes the science behind our paper and a second one by Nelson, which just appeared in PLoS Genetics.

Laboratories around the world are generating a tsunami of deep-sequencing data from nearly every organism, past and present.

Data Diving for Genomics Treasure

When I finished my PhD 15 years ago, the neurosciences defined the main function of brains in terms of processing input to compute output: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” wrote Mike Mauk in 2000 (DOI: 10.1038/76606). Since then, a lot of things have been discovered that make this stimulus-response concept untenable and potentially based largely on laboratory

Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience

This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake.


 UPDATE


 , 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Booming university administrations

I really loathe reviewing for GlamMagz for two main reasons. For one, it’s hard to remain neutral: publication of a paper in my field in such a journal is beneficial both for the field and for the young people who are authors on this paper. Second, the demands of some of my colleagues so often make my blood boil. At that point I’m very happy these reviews are anonymous and I really don’t want to know the names of these colleagues.

Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again

See this post with the associated press releases on brembs.net.

The

 F

orkhead B

 ox

P2 (FOXP2) gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We have discovered that a relative of this gene in fruit flies,

 dFoxP

, is necessary for a type of learning called operant self-learning, which resembles some aspects of language learning.

The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning

UPDATE
 
 , 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user on Twitter, I now know that it is possible to open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends occupy one virtual desktop and the text another. In this way, I can actually review on-screen, but it is one heck of a work-around and by no means convenient.

I cannot take it any more.

Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!

Today, our most recent paper got published, before traditional peer-review, at

 F1000 Research

. The research is about how nominally identical fly stocks can behave completely differently even if tested by the same person in the same lab in the same test.

The way academic publishing should be

There is an interesting study out in the journal PNAS: “Evaluating big deal journal bundles“. The study details the disparity in negotiation skills between different US institutions when haggling with publishers about subscription pricing.

Your university is definitely paying too much for journals

Yesterday,

 Science Magazine

published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was used).

 Science Magazine

reports that 157 journals accepted and 98 rejected the manuscript.

Science Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote

I just got the nicest decline to review ever: That’s how you retire from science: you get to work like normal people. Awesome!

Retiring from science?

The cost of knowledge – in 2003?

Since the birth of our daughter, we spend our summers in Sweden, just like I used to, when I was little. This not only allows her to get more practice in Swedish then she gets talking with just me or her grandmother, but we also get to really recharge our batteries in the fabulous wilderness up there.

How to recharge in Sweden

Flashback: Noise in the brain?

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted this one on Agust 31, 2011:

SummerScienceVideo: science is real

This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of

my article published today at The Conversation. In cases where a problem within a community is detected and collective action is required to address the problem. one needs to strike a fine line or any efforts to convince the community that action is required will fail.

The Conversation: The looming crisis in science

Following the example of Glyn Moody, I thought I’d start a log on the tweets I send around. One never knows what’ll happen to Twitter and besides, this provides a neat place to store and find everything. So here are the tweets for July first and second: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Trying a new feature: Tweetlog

You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT:  Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the instruction“follow the money!” a tad too literally?

Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot

Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon

Due to ongoing discussions on various (social) media, this is a mash-up of several previous posts on the strategy of ‘flipping’ our current &gt;30k subscription journals to an author-financed open access corporate business model. I consider this article processing charge (APC)-based version of ‘gold’ OA a looming threat that may deteriorate the situation even beyond the abysmal state scholarly publishing is already in right now.

How gold open access may make things worse

Public institutions the world over are required to spend their funds responsibly. Commonly, this is done by requiring them to host bids for purchases or services above a certain threshold. If you work at a public institution and have wondered, e.g., why you are only allowed to buy a computer from your computing facility which only sells one particular brand, then the answer likely is that this brand won the bidding contest.

Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?

Earning credibility in post-factual science?

For our course this year I was planning a standard neurogenetic experiment. I hadn’t ever done this experiment in a course, yet, just two weeks ago I tried it once myself, with an N=1. The students would get two groups of

 Drosophila

fruit fly larvae, rovers and sitters (they wouldn’t know which was which). About ten larvae from each group would be placed on one of two yeast patches on an agar plate.

If only all science were this reproducible

The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse than the desolate state we call the

 status quo

today.

Whither now, Open Access?

On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe.

The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly sketch some of the main issues, from several different perspectives.

 As a reader:

I’d like to get a newspaper each morning that tells me about the latest developments, both in terms of general science news (aka.

What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?

The debate over how publishers use the large “non-publication costs” (Fig. 1) that they incur and academic libraries, mainly, are funding has been going on for some time now. Above and beyond the cost items we discuss in our paper on publication costs, it has been established that investments in surveillance technology are also part of the publisher spending academic libraries are financing.

Prioritizing academic publishers

Barely a fortnight has passed since

 Science Magazine

published the outcomes of a hoax perpetrated by one of their reporters, John Bohannon. Not surprisingly, the news article was widely criticized, not the least on this obscure blog. The content was simple enough: Bohannon picked a swath of largely fake journals, submitted fake manuscripts and boasted that more than 60% of his submissions were accepted.

Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion

It is one of these rare events when I can post a video of one of my own talks. This one was in Berlin earlier this year, organized by The Lost Lectures in a very unusual venue, the Stattbad Wedding:    I’m planning to work more closely together with our computing center here to be able to record at least the lectures I give in English here at the university. So maybe there will be some more videos here, soon.

Video: Free will as an evolved brain function

Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?

Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning

In our new lab here in Regensburg, we are currently re-establishing the method of confocal microscopy. To start with, we used the fly lines which show a defect in the temporal structure of their spontaneous behavior (a project of one of our graduate students). this fly line uses two transgenic constructs (c105 and c232) to drive expression in specified neurons in the fly brain, i.e., the merged expression patterns of c105 and c232.

A wonderful example of Open Science

To my knowledge, no neuroscientist hypothesizes that there is magic in our heads. However, it appears this is a hypothesis that flies by the editors at the New York Times.

Free will:  it’s not what you think it is

Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning.

Looking for a PhD student

There have been many discussions about the march for science, pro and con. Some of them have made me doubt the utility of the march, some have made me fear unintended consequences, again others seemed tangential and petty. In these past months, I have struggled to articulate my own reasons why I feel the urge to march for science. Today, I start to see two main reasons to march for science.

Why I march

“an academic career, in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts, creates a danger of intellectual superficiality”

Albert Einstein Isaacson W (2008) Einstein (His Life and Universe) (Simon and Schuster, New York), 1st Ed, p 79

On the productivity of scientists

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of  which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual peer-review. The origin of the discussion can be traced to a list of such publishers hosted by librarian Jeffrey Beall.

Predatory Priorities

This year marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of this legendary letter to the editor in the Journal of systems and Software:  Nothing really has changed in a dozen years, it seems

12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor

bjoern.brembs.blog

It's now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access
movement by
[suggesting](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!search/harnad$20%22subversive$20proposal%22/bit.listserv.vpiej-l/BoKENhK0_00/2MF9QBO9s2IJ)
in his "[subversive
proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal)" in 1994
that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the
internet:

> If every esoteric author in the world this very day established a
> globally accessible local ftp archive for every piece of esoteric
> writing he did from this day forward, the long-heralded transition
> from paper publication to purely electronic publication (of esoteric
> research) would follow suit almost immediately.

Since then, we have been waiting on the behavior of scholars to change,
such that all our works indeed become accessible. This is what has
become known as the "culture shift" in academia, without which no actual
change in our practice can happen. However, no such change can be seen,
not even after all these years. Instead, open access mandates and other
policies have been developed to force scholars to perform certain
behaviors they wouldn't otherwise do. Even in fields where such
deposition of articles has become common, the authors still adhere to
toll-access publishing not for reading or scholarly communication, but
for career advancement -- an obscenely expensive and perverse
outsourcing practice.

Why does such behavioral change take so long? Many of Stevan's
colleagues at the time have since retired and a large section of the
scholarly workforce has been replaced with a new generation, one would
think -- if anything -- more net-affine than the previous one?

In this post, I will try to make the argument that our mistake was to
expect behavior to change when the reasons for the behavior have not
changed. As a behavioral neuroscientist, I have learned that, all else
being equal and depending on time-scales, among the best predictors of
future behavior is past behavior. Thus, if we analyze why scholars
behave the way they do with regards to open scholarship, we may be more
likely to affect that behavior.

Why isn't everybody using preprint servers? What keeps people from
posting their data and code on any of the proliferating repositories?
What is the reason, funders feel they need to use mandates to get
scholars to comply with open science ideals? Why are the non-activist,
regular scholars either lethargic or outright hostile?

In the last decade, it seemed as if the answer to this question was
"because of the reward system!" or "because incentives are missing!". As
if scholars only ever do anything if they are rewarded or incentivized
for it. I think the answer lies elsewhere. It can be articulated as two
main reasons:

1\) They do not care and hence do not know: scholars care about their
scholarship and they shouldn't have to care about such questions. These
questions are exactly what infrastructure should be taking care of, not
scholars.

2\) They have good reasons to close their scholarship: lack of time,
fear of competition, privacy concerns, etc.

I'm simplifying, of course, but would nevertheless tend to argue that
together, 1+2 explain most of scholars' behavior wrt to open
scholarship. Those who care, know and do not have good reasons to be
closed are people like open scholarship activists, e.g., yours truly.
The other 99.5% are the ones who resist "culture change" for either
reason 1) or reason 2) or both. I'm rather skeptical anything can make
either 1) or 2) go away any time soon, let alone both.

Hence, rather than fighting 1+2, as we have been for two decades now, I
suggest to use them in our favor.

A recent poll in our biology/medicine department exemplifies how this
might work: when polled which software the department members are
currently using to prepare images (microscope images, gel pictures and
such) for publication, the majority answered "PowerPoint". Now, I assume
that most everybody on here would understand that PowerPoint is not the,
ahem, *ideal*, most professional software to use for these kinds of
work.
![🙂](https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f642.png){.wp-smiley
style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;"} On the contrary, submission in
PTTX format is explicitly discouraged by most publishers. This means
that the majority of people in our department use a tool that is not the
most professional for the task at hand and the format of which is
discouraged for submission. What funder mandates could be in place to
encourage such odd behavior? Which tenure committee rewards compliant
over superior tool use? Where is the academic incentive system that
pushes scholars to choose PowerPoint over the better-suited
alternatives?

Obviously, there are no mandates or tenure committees incentivizing the
use of such suboptimal tools. Scholars are doing this entirely on their
own accord. Why on earth would educated people do something like that?
The answer is straightforward: for the same reasons 1) and 2) above!
Most faculty don't care and hence don't know: they use what comes on
their computers, pre-installed by the university. Or they have a good
reason to use this tool: it's good enough for them and they don't have
the money for Photoshop or would rather spend the money for experiments
than software. Or they find ImageJ too hard to use as they are already
familiar with the ubiquitous PowerPoint and can't be bothered to switch.
Or installing new software is just too much of a hassle. *Et cetera*.

With this example in mind, how do you get scholars to choose open
publishing alternatives over legacy publishers? How do you get them to
use open evaluation procedures over impact factor? How do you get them
to save their data to a repository, rather than on their thumb drive?
You provide them, automatically, free of charge and ready to use, with
the tools you want them to employ, with the default settings (i.e, open)
you prefer. The large majority who doesn't care and hence doesn't know
will just use what's convenient, quick and free, so they can focus on
what matters most to them: their scholarship. Those who have good
reasons to make their work closed will balance these against the
potential negative consequences (e.g. more time and effort, potential
suspicions if everything else is open, etc.) and be able to make their
work as closed as it needs to be for them. Of course, ideally, such
tools come with their own reasons why one would want to use them, such
as increased efficiency over legacy tools or new, more and better
functionalities. Conversely, equally obviously, you stop providing
scholars with anything you don't want them to use, such as subscription
journals. Or impact factors. Or typewriters.

Since subscriptions globally run at about US\$10bn every year, and the
technology for a scholarly commons can be had off the shelf, the kind of
[modern
infrastructure](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
that would get scholars to change their behavior only needs to be bought
with the funds saved by subscription cancelations. As such an
infrastructure would provide scholars with a superior toolset, it would
also add 'efficiency' and 'functionality' to reason 2) as to why
scholars are using this new, open infrastructure.


Genetically Separable\"
href=\"https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14\"
target=\"\_blank\"\>Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically
Separable


Genetically Separable" href="https://www.slideshare.net/brembs/wcalb14" target="_blank"&gt;Pavlovian and Skinnerian Processes are Genetically Separable

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

"[Standing on the shoulders of
giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants)"
is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It
is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the
primary literature preceding the current work. In today's competitive
scientific enterprise, however, such humility appears completely
misplaced. Instead, what many assume to be required is to convince
everyone that you are the giant, the genius, the prodigy who is
deserving of the research funds, the next position, tenure.

Facilitating this trend are
[journals](https://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/2008/11_1/briefs/03/) who
actively contribute to the existing institutional [incentives for such
hype](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2013/08/29/study-even-in-science-america-skews-toward-hype/)
by claiming to publish "[the world's best
science](https://www.nature.com/citation_pages/images/nature_com.gif)"
or "[the very best in scientific
research](https://www.sciencemag.org/site/help/about/about.xhtml)" and
by simultaneously allowing only very few citations in their articles.

Thus, it should not come to anybody's surprise that we find more and
more articles in such journals , which claim that they found something
unique, novel and counterintuitive that nobody has ever thought of
before and that will require us to [re-write the
textbooks](https://sandwalk.blogspot.de/2013/10/time-to-re-write-textbooks-nature.html).

Point in case is the combo of the article entitled "[Temporal structure
of motor variability is dynamically regulated and predicts motor
learning
ability](https://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n2/full/nn.3616.html)"
with its accompanying [news-type
article](https://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038%2Fnn.3633) (written
by scientists). Both articles claim that the researchers have made the
game-changing discovery that something long though to be a bug in our
movement system is actually a spectacular feature. It is argued that
this is such a huge surprise, because nobody in their right mind would
have ever thought this possible. Their discovery will revolutionize the
way we think about the most basic, fundamental properties of our very
existence. Or something along those lines.

Only that probably most people in the field thought it should be
obvious.

[Skinner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner) is largely
credited with the analogy of operant conditioning and evolution. This
analogy entails that reward and punishment act on behaviors like
selection is acting on mutations in evolution: an animal behaves
variably and encounters a reward after it initiated a particular action.
This reward will make the action now more likely to occur in the future,
just as selection will make certain alleles more frequent in a
population. Already in 1981, Skinner called this "[Selection by
Consequences](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7244649)". Skinner's
analogy sparked wide interest, e.g. an entire [journal
issue](https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=BBS&volumeId=7&seriesId=0&issueId=04),
which later appeared in [book
form](https://books.google.de/books?id=3nY7AAAAIAAJ&dq=variability+mutation+operant+selection&source=gbs_navlinks_s).
Clearly, the idea that reinforcement selects from a variation of
different behaviors is not a new concept at all, but more than three
decades old and rather prominent. This analogy cannot have escaped
anybody working on any kind of operant learning, except they are
seriously neglecting most relevant literature.

Elementary population genetics shows that the [rate of
evolution](https://books.google.de/books?id=257cnXAoREwC&dq) is
proportional to the rate of mutation. This means that [the more variants
a population has to
offer](https://www.sciencemag.org/content/283/5400/404.abstract), the
higher the rate of evolution will be. This, as well, is very basic and
known since decades past.

It is thus no surprise that, for instance, [Allen
Neuringer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Neuringer) has been
studying the role of variability in operant conditioning for decades and
also our own lab is
[studying](https://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000443)
the neurobiological mechanisms underlying behavioral variability. It's a
well-known and not overly complicated concept, so of course people have
been studying various aspects of it for a long time. What was always
assumed, but never explicitly tested, to my knowledge (but see
**update** below!), is the relation between behavioral variability and
learning rate. Does the analogy hold such that increased behavioral
variability leads to increased operant learning rates, just like
increased mutations rates lead to increased rates of evolutionary
change?

Now, the authors of the research paper find that indeed, as assumed for
so many decades, the rate of learning in operant conditioning is
increased in subjects where the initial variability in the behavior is
higher. This is, at least to me, a very exciting finding: finally
someone puts this old assumption to the test and demonstrates that yes,
Skinner got something right with his analogy. To me, this alone is worth
attention and media promotion. Great work, standing on the shoulders of
a giant, Skinner. This is how science should work, great job, Wu *et
al*.! However, this was apparently not good enough for the authors of
these two articles.

Instead of citing the wealth of earlier work (or at least Skinner's
original 1981 article), the authors claim that their results were
surprising to them: "Surprisingly, we found that higher levels of
task-relevant motor variability predicted faster learning". The authors
of the news-type article were similarly stunned: "These results provide
intriguing evidence that some of the motor variability commonly
attributed to unwanted noise is in fact exploration in motor command
space."

The question is of course, if this is ignorance on the part of the
(seven in total) involved authors or a publication strategy, perceived
to be superior to the "standing on the shoulder of giants" approach (and
what a giant Skinner is!). It is, of course, moot to speculate about
motives or competence without asking the authors directly. Perhaps there
is even a third way besides incompetence or hype that I'm not aware of.

I don't know any of the authors personally, so I decided to ask a mutual
friend, [John Krakauer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Krakauer),
one of the leading experts in this field and whose papers the authors
cite, what he thought about these articles. Specifically, I asked him
what he thought about the citation of his article as a reference for the
surprising nature of their finding:

> Until now, motor variability has been viewed as an unwanted feature of
> movements, a noise that the brain is able to reduce only with
> practice^[8](https://jn.physiology.org/content/108/2/578.full)^.

In his reply, he corrects the authors:

> <div>
>
> It is true that in our paper we were focused on variability as
> something that needs to be reduced when best performance is required.
> That said, in the discussion we explicitly mention that variability
> can also be used for exploration. As an example of this distinction,
> we mention the difference in variability between when songbirds are
> rehearsing their song versus when they must perform perfectly for
> their mate.
>
> </div>

Apparently, at least one of the cited authors finds this citation not to
be in order. With regard to the original article, John wrote: "Given
that we posited that there is an operant component in error-based
adaptation in 2011, I'm glad to see that their results are consistent
with this view."

It appears to me that the authors may know the relevant literature and
selectively cite it in order to make their research results appear more
earth-shattering and novel. If that were the case, it is up to anyone to
speculate what the motivations behind this strategy were. In the best of
all worlds, the authors do know their ways around the more modern
literature of their specific subfields, but are unaware of the
historical work in their field nor of the relevant work in related
fields. In this case, the two papers are prime examples of the
insularity of some fields of inquiry and demonstrate how more deep and
interdisciplinary reading/training could improve the isolation of highly
specialized fields in science. That being said, the authors being
unaware of such a prominent concept at the heart of their method would
constitute an indictment in its own right, at least in my books. Then
again, one can never be sure to have read all the relevant literature
and perhaps this can happen even to the best of us?

The news-type article doubling down on the hype reveals another aspect
that has been worrying me for some time now. Given that the most
important factor for a manuscript to be published in the most
high-ranking journals is to get past the professional editor, the
ensuing peer-review is likely to be biased in favor of publishing the
paper. For one, the reviewers being experts in the field, they can cite
the resulting paper and make their own research look hotter. Moreover,
if the manuscript is published, it offers the chance of padding their
resume with such fluff news-type articles and get (or keep) their own
name out and associated with the big journals. Obviously, any
publication in such high-ranking journals benefits not only the authors
themselves, but also the field at large, creating a whole new set of
incentives for peer-reviewers and authors of news-type articles.

**UPDATE**, February 10, 2014:

Allen Neuringer just sent me one of [his
papers](https://web.reed.edu/psychology/docs/LearningToVary.pdf) in
which he showed that training rats to be highly variable enabled them to
learn a very complicated operant task, when animals trained to be only
moderately variable failed to learn the task or did do only very slowly:
[Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2002, 9 (2),
250-258](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2FBF03196279). In
contrast, Doolan and Bizo (2013) have tried to duplicate these findings
in humans and [failed](https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-349000232.html).
Thus, the principle behind the experiments of Wu *et al.* have already
been tested and established in a mammalian model, just not in humans.
Thus, it's still good to see that humans are no exception in these
processes, no doubt about that, but surely there is nothing
revolutionary or even surprising about this work. On the contrary, based
on work in rats, and from predictions many decades ago, the results
presented by Wu *et al.* are precisely what we would have expected.
Needless to say, the authors cite neither Skinner nor Neuringer.

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the primary literature preceding the current work. In today’s competitive scientific enterprise, however, such humility appears completely misplaced.

Hiding the shoulders of giants?

*[During my [flyfishing vacation last
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n862.html), pretty much
nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I've migrated the blog to
WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I'm not
even at the computer. I'm using this functionality to re-blog a few
posts from the [archives](http://blogarchive.brembs.net) during the
month of august while I'm away. This post is from [February 9,
2011](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n704.html):]{style="font-size: 12px;"} 
*

 

In this week's journal club, we talked about an old paper from 1918!
"[The reactions to light and to gravity in Drosophila and its
mutants](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jez.1400250103/abstract){target="_blank"
rel="external"}" by Robert McEwen, in the *Journal of Experimental
Zoology*.

As the title says, the author studied how the fruit fly
*[Drosophila](http://brembs.net/learning/drosophila/){target="_blank"
rel="external"}* responds to light and gravity. He tested this in
walking flies and compared flies both with intact wings and clipped
wings, wing mutations, clipped antennae, glued wings or clipped middle
legs. He discovered that flies without wings or with mutated wing shape,
show less movement towards light (i.e., less phototaxis). This finding
was later confirmed by one of the founders of modern neurogenetics,
Seymour Benzer
([1967](https://www.pnas.org/content/58/3/1112.full.pdf+html?sid=a682d90d-38bb-468e-a0fe-516988a69491){target="_blank"})
and we also find this in our experiments. We have now set out to find
out which neuronal mechanisms are involved in this drastic change in
behavior.

In order to get the flies to show phototaxis, McEwen developed a machine
to gently tap the tube in which the flies were placed, to get them to
walk. He described the necessity for flies to be active in order to show
a consistent orientation towards a light source: without walking
behavior being either initiated spontaneously or by the tapping machine,
flies would not walk towards the light themselves. If the flies were at
rest, light was not an orienting stimulus for them. This key insight was
formulated by McEwen at the very end of the paper:

> <div>
>
> Lastly, it may be well to emphasize the peculiar relation which exists
> in
> [Drosophila](http://brembs.net/learning/drosophila/){target="_blank"
> rel="external"} between general activity and phototropism. This
> phenomenon has been clearly recognized by Carpenter and in general I
> agree with this author's conclusions. The fact seems to be that this
> insect is not phototropic unless it is in a certain physiological
> state brought on by, or at least accompanied by, activity. When the
> fly reaches a certain degree of activity, induced by various means, it
> suddenly becomes phototropic. When it quiets down, however, it may
> still crawl about but ceases to be phototropic. Thus, when an insect
> has been exposed to constant illumination for some time, it no longer
> orients to light but wanders aimlessly up and down the tube.
> Eventually such an animal may even come to rest with its head away
> from the source of light.
>
> </div>

The technique described mimics what other colleagues have later
developed in other fly paradigms based on vision and walking, such as
the
"[fly-stampede](https://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/fly/article/9139){target="_blank"}"
paradigm. But the insight reaches much further than that. More recent
research has shown that the state of the animal has minute control over
how the environment is processed. For instance, leeches respond with
various behaviors to local mechanosensory stimulation (i.e., touch).
However, when they feed, the biogenic amine serotonin is released and
prevents the mechanosensory neurons from transmitting the stimuli -- the
animal becomes unresponsive when it feeds ([Gaudry & Kristan,
2009](https://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v12/n11/full/nn.2400.html){target="_blank"}).
Another study showed that motion-sensitive neurons in the optic lobes of
the fly brain increase their gain when the fly is flying, as opposed to
when it is not flying ([Maimon et al.,
2010](https://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n3/abs/nn.2492.html){target="_blank"}).
Analogous results were obtained when walking vs. sitting flies were
compared ([Chiappe et al.
2010](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VRT-50KKY4V-4&_user=4113557&_coverDate=08%2F24%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000047720&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=4113557&md5=587c1ad8c1256e6f1543427990606546&searchtype=a){target="_blank"}).
In another, also very sophisticated study, Haag et al.
([2010](https://www.pnas.org/content/107/46/20104.full){target="_blank"})
showed how an identified motor neuron responds more strongly to visual
input when the animal is flying than when it is at rest. Finally, Tang
and Juusola
([2010](https://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014455))
report evidence that the direction in which a fly attempts to turn
changes the way in which the optic lobes process the visual information
on the side towards the fly attempts to turn, compared to the
contralateral side.

All these groups have, largely independently of each other, discovered
the biological mechanisms for something that already McEwen (and
Carpenter, cited there) had understood: animals don't just respond to
stimuli in always the same, stereotypical way: all animals have many
different ways to treat and evaluate the incoming sensory stream,
depending on what they are doing at the moment. The decisive factor for
understanding animal behavior is not the environment, or the sensory
organs, it is the animal itself. Apparently, this profound insight was
known long ago and we're just rediscovering it now, in various places,
all over the world.

Something *was* new in all the recent studies, though: they all provide
first mechanistic insight into how brains balance internal and external
processing. All these studies show that there seems to be a smooth
gradient between decision-making and attention-like processing, even in
invertebrates: Gaudry and Kristan call it decision-making, when their
leeches 'decide' to ignore stimuli while they feed, even though the
incoming sensory stimuli are blocked already at the very first synapse.
Chiappe et al., on the other hand, relate their phenomenon to attention
and Haag et al. also mention attention in their paper, with their
effects being observed many synapses downstream of the sensory neurons
-- the word 'decision' does not occur in either of the two papers. It
appears as if future neurophysiological research is bound to show that
the distinction between attention-like mechanisms and decision-making,
which seems so intuitive and clear-cut, may dissolve when we start to
unravel how brains actually do it. Now when will we come accross the
ancient text that already pre-empts that insight?
![nuetral.png](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/e107_images/emotes/yellow/nuetral.png){decoding="async"}

References:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

McEwen, R. (1918). The reactions to light and to gravity in
[Drosophila](http://brembs.net/learning/drosophila/){target="_blank"
rel="external"} and its mutants Journal of Experimental Zoology, 25 (1),
49-106 DOI:
[10.1002/jez.1400250103](https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jez.1400250103){rev="review"} 
Zhu, Y., & Frye, M. (2009). Neurogenetics and the "fly-stampede":
dissecting neural circuits involved in visual behaviors Fly, 3 (3),
209-211 DOI:
[10.4161/fly.3.3.9139](https://dx.doi.org/10.4161/fly.3.3.9139){rev="review"} 
Gaudry, Q., & Kristan, W. (2009). Behavioral choice by presynaptic
inhibition of tactile sensory terminals Nature Neuroscience, 12 (11),
1450-1457 DOI:
[10.1038/nn.2400](https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.2400){rev="review"} 
Maimon, G., Straw, A., & Dickinson, M. (2010). Active flight increases
the gain of visual motion processing in
[Drosophila](http://brembs.net/learning/drosophila/){target="_blank"
rel="external"} Nature Neuroscience, 13 (3), 393-399 DOI:
[10.1038/nn.2492](https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.2492){rev="review"} 
Chiappe, M., Seelig, J., Reiser, M., & Jayaraman, V. (2010). Walking
Modulates Speed Sensitivity in
[Drosophila](http://brembs.net/learning/drosophila/){target="_blank"
rel="external"} Motion Vision Current Biology, 20 (16), 1470-1475 DOI:
[10.1016/j.cub.2010.06.072](https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.06.072){rev="review"} 
Haag, J., Wertz, A., & Borst, A. (2010). Central gating of fly optomotor
response Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (46),
20104-20109 DOI:
[10.1073/pnas.1009381107](https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1009381107){rev="review"} 
Tang, S., & Juusola, M. (2010). Intrinsic Activity in the Fly Brain
Gates Visual Information during Behavioral Choices [PLoS
ONE](https://plosone.org){target="_blank" rel="external"}, 5 (12) DOI:
[10.1371/journal.pone.0014455](https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0014455){rev="review"}

During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away. This post is from February 9, 2011:

bjoern.brembs.blog

After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift?

Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms

Hiding the shoulders of giants?

Flashback: Nothing new in science?

SummerScienceVideo: fruit fly research