we can sleep later

Many congratulations go out to a friend who has just secured external funding for a very cool (non-biological) research project. I'm exceedingly happy for him!!! Since the funding is coming from the Space Vehicles Directorate, this makes him, at least temporarily, a rocket scientist.



At least some of the grants we're all writing are getting funded... it brings me hope.

I've known there are journals that have some air of royalty, such as those published by the British Royal Society, or the scientific journal of King Faisal University, but I may have just discovered my new favorite obscure journal title, the Princess Takamatsu Symposia.

Princess Takamatsu's mother died of cancer, and she founded a cancer research fund that sponsored these symposia and other lectureships, which continue to this day. She also spoke out against male-only royal succession in Japan. She sounds like she was a scientifically-literate, civic-minded feminist. Her journal seems moribund since the last volume was published in 1995... and that combined with my not doing cancer research seems to assure that I'll never be able to add this title to my CV.


Princess Takamatsu of Japan, born Tokugawa Kikuko, 1911-2004

While there are many reasons I can't, and wouldn't want to compete with Dr. Isis' shoe of the week, I felt I had to post this pair I saw on Etsy.



There are many creative people in the MSOE -- Mad Scientists of Etsy -- and some of the creations make perfect gifts for the hard-to-buy-for scientists in your life.

There's been a recent renewal of concerns about anonymous science blogging in the wake of DGT's (thankfully) temporary absence. People have been posting their own rules for pseudonymous blogging, and people have been debating taking their own blogs (or some of their more incendiary posts) down. DrugMonkey's appraisal seems, as usual, the wisest:

I have been flabbergasted to read comments suggesting that so many bloggers have not thought these issues through. Really.

For me, at least while I'm untenured, I don't think it makes sense to blog under my own name. I started this because I had been reading and commenting on others' (mostly anonymous) science blogs and I wanted a place to write longer reactions, and to add my $0.02 to the conversation. It's also where I can vent about topics that I might have more difficulty talking about with colleagues face to face, and to think through issues. I hope it is useful to some others and I'm not just writing for myself, but I do appreciate the chance to write something that's not a journal article/book chapter/peer review/grant.

I absolutely feel hemmed in by the prospect of giving away too many identifying details in posts. I've written anonymized posts on amazing, awful anecdotes that I feel I can't publish because I would suffer professional costs if the people/characters in the stories realize who I am. I want to share these because these blogs are how we do communicate to one another what kinds of terrible situations can and do arise in academic science, so we can try to avoid them happening to us. I'd also love to put them up because they are pretty damn entertaining... but for now, they will be reserved for late-night scary science storytelling.

I admire the experimental details posted by some scientists who blog under their real names, but I'm not sure I'd want to put up, in a google-searchable fashion, so many unpublished details of my work. (Good motivation to publish quickly, though... I could use that...) I'm very much looking forward to listening to four perspectives on this topic on Monday at 2:30pm during the "Open Science – The Risks, Rewards and Challenges" session at the American Society for Microbiology general meeting.



I am familiar with microbial evolutionist Rosie Redfield and phylogeneticist/PLoS Biology editor Jon Eisen, and both are proponents of open access publications and open science. I do not know Samuel Kaplan, though he is a former chair of ASM's publications board, or Joseph Deken, who has apparently been working on integrating computing into biology for many years.

For those not going to Philly -- and judging from the hard sell from ASM in recent months, many of us are not going this year -- you can watch this symposium live on Microbe World.

...illustrated by recent articles in the Chronicle and The Onion.

While I can't comment on otter research, the complaints of the humanities scholar about how graduate students read texts ring true for young scientists too.

Why is it that so many graduate students are reflexively critical of what they read? Why are they so eager to dismiss, dislike, and disrespect work that has already been done before they can even hope to begin to contribute?

I think there are some upsides to the arrogance that grad students initially bring to reading the established literature. Grad students, some of them at least, are the future of any field. It's a wonderful thing that they critically evaluate for themselves everything that's become conventional wisdom, because some of that conventional wisdom is wrong. And as we become more entrenched in academic science it's harder to spot the flaws in the conventional wisdom that we've embraced for 10, 20, 30 years...

I remain a very detailed reader and reviewer, but I'm not nearly as acerbic as I was as a graduate student. I also find I have much less time to take on accepted ideas when they are assumed in papers I review... most recently, I lost hours of a week's vacation working on my laptop trying to convince myself (or disprove the author's assertion) of one aspect of one virus' lifestyle. In the end, I now believe there isn't much/any data against the conventional wisdom, but it is crazy that I chose to spend a substantial fraction of my time at a beach house chasing this idea down. I'm too busy now, but I do envy the perspective and time that graduate students have when they read the literature, and when they assist in or write their own peer reviews.

I've been confronting a few failures of peer review recently, and I think it's time to revive peer reviewing posts. Like most failures of peer review, it may very well be the editors who dropped the ball and not the reviewers -- or a combination of the two.

1. I came across a 2008 paper with an incredibly low resolution figure that prevented me from reading the labels of the data points (and there were >100 labels). This wasn't a problem of my computer (the pdf looked just as bad -- even more pixelated and harder to resolve at higher magnifications -- with several viewers), didn't get better on the print out, wasn't available at a better resolution in the html version), I asked others to try their hand at reading it with no success, etc. Now, this wasn't a very important figure to read to get the conclusions of the paper, I admit... it's more that the figure had to exist to get the paper published. But it was important to me for a study I'm trying to start, and I had to spend several hours deciphering the figure. I know that the reviewers could not have been able to evaluate the data in the published version of the figure, so either the journal published a lower resolution version than they gave the reviewers or neither/none of the reviewers actually read/checked this figure.

2. Twice in the last month I've been asked by senior scientists what I think of a recent paper in our field. I happen to know the paper well, since I reviewed it and recommended rejection on a number of solid grounds. Even though I still think the study is flawed, I must have been in the minority, since the paper was accepted with only a few changes. However few people will read the paper thoroughly enough to see the newly introduced hedging statements; in this busy day and age, all most people will read or remember are the title, the abstract and the quality of the journal it was published in.

So I gave these senior scientists my detailed rationale for why one shouldn't trust the paper's conclusions, it was easy to convince them, and I doubt either one will be citing it anytime soon. But I can't shake the feeling of being a failure myself as a reviewer, since the paper did get into the literature virtually unchanged. Rereading the review, I was constructive in my criticism, but I clearly challenged the premises of the paper, and backed up my argument with references. I reiterated the cause for rejection in more frank language in the confidential comments to the editor. And maybe, with another editor, my comments would have caused the paper to be rejected... but the next time I feel strongly about a rejection I will be tempted to use more emphatic language.

While many are talking and blogging about the two cultures these days, I want to highlight the gulf between our academic disciplines with an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the attempts to speed up publication in the humanities. While peer reviewers in science are being pushed for one or two week turnarounds from an increasing number of journals, the humanities are trying to move the average time from eliciting a book review to publication from year(s) to months.

The article says one of the reasons for the long turnaround is that "reviewing tends to be a rather thankless task, so it gets pushed to the bottom of a reviewer's agenda." Certainly, it's a similar situation in the sciences... but there seems to be a stronger system of reciprocal altruism in the sciences, where we all need to get our papers published, we all want them published quickly, and we do (largely) comply with the deadlines we're given. The article also highlighted the low number of reviews that can be published in each monthly/quarterly issue of a journal, and it could be that online-only journals will spur faster publication times in the humanities just as they have in the sciences.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison between the fields: the publications being discussed are the peer review themselves.

I appreciate how quickly biology progresses these days, but it can be overwhelming. Having to keep up with online-early publications, the myriad table of contents emails, the automatic search emails, the increasingly short review times for journals... at times the slower publishing pace of other parts of academia could be very appealing.