High-resolution images of the head of the blind salamander Proteus anguinus reveal adaptations for life in the dark. The proteus, also called the “olm”, is a strange beast – locals in the 1600s actually believed it was a baby dragon. In fact a blind salamander, it is snake-like in appearance, colorless, and can live up to 100 years.

The market power of academic publishers has been a concern for all those academic fields where publication in scholarly journals is the norm. For most non-economist researchers, the anti-trust aspects of academic publishing are likely confusing and opaque. For instance, libraries and consortia are exempted from organizing tenders for their publication needs as each article exists only in one journal with one publisher.

Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we may not have decades to get our house in order. The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics. Around the world, anti-science movements seek to discredit reason and abolish science.

or: how journals are like 1930s Rolls Royce Phantom IIs Recently, the “German Science and Humanities Council” (Wissenschaftsrat) has issued their “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access”. On page 33 they write that increasing the competition between publishers is an explicit goal of current transformative agreements: This emphasis on competition refers back to the simple fact

A team led by scientists from Monash University have completed a major milestone towards achieving the rescue of the critically endangered helmeted honeyeater.

We have a Q&A with author Tom Edinburgh from the University of Cambridge on his new GigaByte paper presenting Sepsis-3 criteria in AmsterdamUMCdb, which is one of the largest freely accessible Intensive Care database in Europe.

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.

We are pleased to see the 2022 Junior Research Parasite Award go to Jack Pilgrim for his work published last year in GigaScience, so here we highlight the ecosystem of awards acknowledging different parts of the research cycle. Jokingly spurred by a controversial medical editorial calling people carrying out data re-use and meta-analyses “research parasites”, this gave rise to the launch of the “Research Parasite Awards” focused on

UPDATE: GigaByte and GBIF webinar video added below.

Sometimes, only small changes are required for potentially huge downstream effects.