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#publishing

19 posts18 participants1 post today

I need to find a music platform that won’t feed my tunes to AI.

I want to get back into releasing tracks, but I’m super hesitant. Even with tools like #Anubis and #Nepenthes, I’m still reluctant to ever return my tracks to the web. AI has sedated my creativity and urge to share. I don’t want to be scraped and fed to an LLM.

Suggestions would be appreciated.

And yet another one in the ever increasing list of analyses showing that top journals are bad for science:

"Thus, our analysis show major claims published in low-impact journals are significantly more likely to be reproducible than major claims published in trophy journals. "

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

bioRxiv · A retrospective analysis of 400 publications reveals patterns of irreproducibility across an entire life sciences research fieldThe ReproSci project retrospectively analyzed the reproducibility of 1006 claims from 400 papers published between 1959 and 2011 in the field of Drosophila immunity. This project attempts to provide a comprehensive assessment, 14 years later, of the replicability of nearly all publications across an entire scientific community in experimental life sciences. We found that 61% of claims were verified, while only 7% were directly challenged (not reproducible), a replicability rate higher than previous assessments. Notably, 24% of claims had never been independently tested and remain unchallenged. We performed experimental validations of a selection of 45 unchallenged claim, that revealed that a significant fraction (38/45) of them is in fact non-reproducible. We also found that high-impact journals and top-ranked institutions are more likely to publish challenged claims. In line with the reproducibility crisis narrative, the rates of both challenged and unchallenged claims increased over time, especially as the field gained popularity. We characterized the uneven distribution of irreproducibility among first and last authors. Surprisingly, irreproducibility rates were similar between PhD students and postdocs, and did not decrease with experience or publication count. However, group leaders, who had prior experience as first authors in another Drosophila immunity team, had lower irreproducibility rates, underscoring the importance of early-career training. Finally, authors with a more exploratory, short-term engagement with the field exhibited slightly higher rates of challenged claims and a markedly higher proportion of unchallenged ones. This systematic, field-wide retrospective study offers meaningful insights into the ongoing discussion on reproducibility in experimental life sciences ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Swiss National Science Foundation, 310030_189085 ETH-Domain’s Open Research Data (ORD) Program (2022)

The potential downsides of platforms…

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their inde­pen­dent visions and ambitions. We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago: fol­lowing the old news­paper schematic, they aren’t the printing presses, but rather the assign­ment editors.

Platform reality

This is a very interesting insight. How the platform incentivizes a type of post / ideology that users will adhere to because of our human nature to want to belong to a tribe. It resonates with me given how much self censorship I’ve done during the days when I only posted on twitter. To be clear, I truly believed that twitter would change the world in the 2010s and I still believe I personally got so much value from that network during that time.

There’s one platform for which none of this is true, and that’s the web platform, because it offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.

To me that last line – the web as a printing press – was always the kernel that has stayed true and what makes me excited about the web. To me there really has been only one other technology that is similar to the web that’s grown organically with limited control exerted by anyone – and that is bitcoin. I have a complicated relationship with bitcoin, having minted one, owning a decent pile at one point and then landed on it being a terrible thing for the world. I believe that it’s the perfect package of weaponized greed and the thrall of independence from a government that appeals to my libertarian sensibilities.

Tabling that discussion for another post, I strongly believe that it’s that independence and federation that keeps the web amazing. I’ve found more people independently publishing on the web today than even during the heydays of blogging, you know back when Google had still not developed the advertising and incentive machine it has today.

Combined with my own recent journey that sometimes the friction is what makes life meaningful, what enables you to savor the outcome, this adds a trifecta to what makes life enjoyable and meaningful – you also need the independence, space and the right incentives to keep thinking of your own original ideas. From that perspective, for someone like me, posting only on social media almost made me lose my voice, my tenor, my thoughts and my authenticity. As always, ymmv.

Robin SloanPlatform realityEnjoy it while it lasts.

**#OpenAccess Manager (all genders) gesucht**

In meinem Team an der #TUWien ist eine Stelle frei! Wenn du Lust hast, mit uns an der Schnittstelle von #Wissenschaft & #Publishing zu arbeiten, dann bewirb dich: jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/254479

Was dich erwartet: Ein engagiertes Team, Aufgaben mit Sinn und Wirkung und ein inspirierendes Arbeitsumfeld mitten in Wien.

Ich freue mich über jede Weiterleitung, Empfehlung, Nachfrage oder Bewerbung!

Ok paging all #openscience and particularly #openaccess folks: we have a well-paid, permanent (!) 80% #job opening in our #OA team at the university #library in Bern, Switzerland. We are looking for a colleague to help us advance #diamondOA, communicate open access across #campus and continue to build #diamond #publishing networks - on a local, national and international level. If you know of someone, please forward the job-posting to them. Cheers ohws.prospective.ch/public/v1/

Uni BernUni Bern: Wissenschaftliche*r Mitarbeiter*in Open Access

Trying not to be too disappointed that my interview with a local magazine ended abruptly when the journo found out my book is self-published.

Apparently her magazine has a policy not to cover those books.

She was very excited about it and we talked for 20 minutes. Then: "Tell me how you got your publishing contract."

I hadn't tried to hide anything. She just didn't read the tip sheet I sent her.

She apologized but I'm still bummed.