Tim
@timisstuck
Executive Editor at Life Science Alliance. I help decide how biology thinks 🤔 Views are my own and do not reflect editorial policy. www.timfessenden.com
Weekend reading: this back and forth about a p16 reporter mouse for senescence and aging research. Read here in @emboreports.org and many more comments PubPeer. It seems to me that many journals are quite reluctant to publish these correspondences, to their great detriment.
Nice benchmarking resource for publication integrity guardrails with AI They prompted agents to generate false data or other forms of misconduct. Prompts were overt or covert attempts at misconduct, compared against a benign request. Strong showing for Claude, quite poor for DeepSeek
It's interesting being an editor of a journal and yet finding myself targeted by these offers from our *much* more aggressive competitor @frontiersin.bsky.social
Helpful writer of the catastrophic charges proposed at OMB here. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...
Was a very fun week at the @embl.org symposium on phase separation! A nice emerging theme was pH and electrostatic charge. Not much grappling with terms/naming conventions, but it was a safe space for just calling things as you wanted. Here was a nice view towards my colleagues @embopress.org
Here for the week with my cherished colleagues @embopress.org (and some phase separation thanks to the EMBL symposium)
Another fantastic meeting at CSHL!! The Genome Biology meeting was probably the most scientifically diverse small meeting I’ve ever been to. Curious, generous folks happy to share and learn from one another. Huge thanks to the organizers especially Matthew Meyerson!
Delighted to be back at @cshlmeetings.bsky.social for Biology of Genomes, a historically important meeting w a really diverse and exciting lineup!
Love getting predatory solicitations to submit to a journal (Cancers) with a higher impact factor than our own at @lsajournal.org . The only way MDPI got my email address is: Attendance at a recent immunology conference (AAI Immunology) OR My authorship on editorials for LSA.
Another delightful visit to my alma mater @ucscscience.bsky.social Thanks to @needhibhalla.bsky.social and many others for exciting + important convo. Most of all thanks to students who came to my talk w SO MANY good questions about careers + publishing. Until next time!
I got to see a former trainee defend her thesis @rockefeller.edu! Marwa Saad worked with me at MIT during my postdoc and gave me this fabulous mug (still have it!) Then we both ended up at Rockefeller! She was a grad student w with @danmucida.bsky.social and I’m here at @rupress.org Congrats!!
Important pivot underway by my colleagues @embopress.org to embrace evolutionary biology, diverse species, and non-reductionist approaches to biological systems. Bravo!
Gould's essay is exquisite and was taken up admirably by Bowerman (who corresponded with Gould, quoted in his piece). Both provided me with fantastic examples outside cell biology and biomedicine that perfectly highlight the universality of this issue:
A few years earlier, Gould wrote Cordelia's Dilemma to discuss why scientists decide that some data are not interesting. While paleontologists scoured the fossil record for evidence of evolution, the non-change (stasis) they often observed was explicitly uninteresting according to Gould:
Writing my recent editorial was secretly just an excuse to read a bunch of Stephen Jay Gould. I was led there by Howard Browman in his editorial. Browman frames question of negative data as a deeply philosophical issue of what motivates scientists to communicate their findings.
Editorial by me, in our March issue! Negative results are a thorny issue in essentially all fields of scientific research, and deserve a renewed look by authors and editors 👇
Returning to this to emphasize that NIH action/inaction is preventing funds from getting to researchers. Important to note the difference between legislative budget actions and executive disbursement actions. graph via @deniswirtz.bsky.social
Congrats @sudha-kumari.bsky.social on this nice paper out in @emboreports.org 🥳
The first person listed under "speakers" is this guy. There is no one at Brown by this name... The homepage link takes you to a wikipedia article about him. But h index = 137!!
One of the spammy things you see repeatedly as a journal editor are invitations to publish conference proceedings. They get to have a paper and the targeted journal collects an APC. Like this one. Is this real? Who knows