It’s December, the festive season and the end of  year are approaching fast –  and it’s time for our traditional look back on the past 12 months at GigaScience Press . Once more, we are pleased with the view in the rear mirror.  In its 11th year, GigaScience again published exceptional “big data” science (read on for examples). And GigaScience’s

In a recent article published in Synthese, philosopher of science Pekka Syrjänen asks “does a theory become better confirmed if it fits data that was not used in its construction versus if it was specifically designed to fit the data?”

Die Fachzugehörigkeit ist ein für die Auffindbarkeit und Beschreibung von Datensätzen sehr relevantes Metadatum. Ihre Angabe wird deshalb in vielen Forschungsdatenrepositorien empfohlen.

“And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.” –Revelation 10:10 As machine learning becomes more and more important to chemistry, it’s worth reflecting on Richard Sutton’s 2019 blog post about the “bitter lesson.” In

To seek an answer to the question posed in the title, I sought out reliable data on open access journals. My first port of call was the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Although DOAJ certainly isn’t a complete listing of open access journals, as is well documented in ‘The OA Diamond Journals Study‘ (2021), it will at least help provide a minimum bound answer to the question.

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?

I don’t remember now when I first noticed bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines. I imagine 2016 at the latest, because on our Sauropocalypse that year Mike and I saw examples at both BYU and Dinosaur Journey.

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.

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.

A quick note to support a recent Twitter thread https://twitter.com/rdmpage/status/1729816558866718796?s=61&t=nM4XCRsGtE7RLYW3MyIpMA The article “Diversification of flowering plants in space and time” by Dimitrov et al. describes a genus-level phylogeny for 14,244 flowering plant genera. This is a major achievement, and yet neither the tree nor the data supporting that tree are readily available.