Our most recent manuscript was almost ready for submission. We were planning to send it to an open access journal. It was then that I had the thought: how many papers in the reference list are freely available? It somehow didn’t make much sense to point readers towards papers that they might not be able to access. So, I wondered if there was a quick way to determine how papers in my reference list were open access.

I thought I’d share this piece of analysis looking at productivity of people in the lab. Here, productivity means publishing papers. This is unfortunate since some people in my lab have made some great contributions to other peoples’ projects or have generally got something going, but these haven’t necessarily transferred into print. Also, the projects people have been involved in have varied in toughness.

I thought I’d compile a list of songs related to biomedical science. These were all found in my iTunes library. I’ve missed off multiple entries for the same kind of thing, as indicated.

In this post I’ll describe a computational method for splitting two sides of a cell biological structure. It’s a simple method that relies on principal component analysis , otherwise known as PCA.

The newly created Early Career Ecologist Section of the Ecological Society of America is to organizing a mentoring program for the upcoming ESA meeting in Baltimore. ESA can be a big and intimidating meeting for students and postdocs. Let’s face it, many of us are socially awkward and meeting new people can be hard – especially if the people you want to meet are more senior.

We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The work was mainly done by Cristina Gutiérrez Caballero, a post-doc in the lab. We had some help from Selena Burgess and Richard Bayliss at the University of Leicester, with whom we have an ongoing collaboration. The paper in a nutshell We found that TACC3 binds the plus-ends of microtubules via an interaction with ch-TOG. So TACC3 is a +TIP.

When I started this blog, my plan was to write about interesting papers or at least blog about the ones from my lab. This post is a bit of both. I was recently asked to write a “Journal Club” piece for Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, which is now available online. It’s paywalled unfortunately. It’s also very short, due to the format. For these reasons, I thought I’d expand a bit on the papers I highlighted.

Back of the envelope calculations for this post. An old press release for a paper on endocytosis by Tom Kirchhausen contained this fascinating factoid: If this is true it is absolutely staggering. Let’s check it out. A synaptic vesicle is ~40 nm in diameter.

A couple of months ago Micah J. Marty and I had a twitter conversation and subsequent email exchange about how citations worked with preprints. I asked Micah if I could share our email discussion since I thought it would be useful to others and he kindly said yes. What follows are Michah’s questions followed by my responses. At the level of the journal nothing happens.

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge) I am currently the remotely working member of Weecology, finishing up my PhD in the lower elevation and better air of Kansas, while the rest of my colleagues are still in Utah, due to developing a chronic illness and finally getting diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  The relocation is actually working out really well.  I’m in better shape because I’m not having to