"Once there is no need for humans to run the economy anymore, the AGI oligarchy begins harvesting the organic biosphere, including humans, as building materials and fuel for manufacturing a next generation of carbon-based AI systems." Happy Friday, y'all 📎 arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369

Last month was another record for bioRxiv submissions. The pandemic surge and lag now clearly in the past and the growth continues. Thanks as ever to all the authors, readers affiliates, funders and amazing internal openRxiv team who make this happen!

I know it seems like a heretical idea, but one way to figure out if a preprint is really interesting (to you) is... to read the preprint. Then, in the spirit of sharing, send a note to authors: a simple kudos or a more detailed question. I do this a dozen times a year. It's awesome. Try it.

No, we don't need better tools to detect AI - that horse bolted last year. We need to move upstream. Stop incentivizing volume, raise the bar for legitimacy, require verifiable provenance, and solve the identity validation problem. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How much of the scientific literature is generated by AI?

Tools for reliably estimating what artificial intelligence is being used for are still lacking.

nature.com

Despite its importance, peer review is something rarely taught. HHMI have a new peer review training program that takes advantage of preprints openrxiv.org/peer-review-...

Peer review training with preprints [Guest post] - openRxiv

About Guest Posts The openRxiv blog includes occasional guest posts on different aspects of science communication and open research. This allows us to provide space for new perspectives from groups pi...

openrxiv.org

"We propose a fundamental change in what counts: researchers should be assessed not by journal publications or journal-based metrics, but by the outputs they have publicly shared themselves..." HHMI's pitch for a healthier research assessment paradigm 🚀 zenodo.org/records/1960...

I think I'm not old enough to be watching Euphoria.

"Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory. If a scientific idea is young and it’s not cringe, it probably has no promise. But if it’s old and it’s still cringe, it probably has no merit." www.experimental-history.com/p/nothing-ev...

Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.

OR: the Halo theory of science

experimental-history.com

Nature Publishing Group finding more dastardly ways to lock us in, well beyond what I complained about in my letter declining reviewing for them

This is hands down the best article I've read on this topic: the imperative to transcend the superficiality of the pdf for research outputs. "This is the bridge from search to understanding: from “find me a paper about X” to “help me reason whether X applies in context Y.”

Research Information@researchinfo.bsky.social · 7mo ago

NEW ANALYSIS/OPINION: After the PDF: A new unit of knowledge for the AI era www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opi... Steve Smith argues that the "Knowledge Object" should be considered the atomic unit of the scholarly record

GLP-1 agonists (eg Ozempic) are showing promise to reduce alcohol drinking and perhaps opioid use. This is, of course, a potential therapeutic success which arises from the random walking of science, not an “efficient” directed research program.

Preprints of pandemic potential - new historical piece from me on the history of bioRxiv/medRxiv, their role in the pandemic, and the way forward. 1/n journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Did slashing multiple vaccines from the childhood vaccine schedule bring the US in line with other countries? In a word, no. The US now recommends all kids be protected against fewer diseases than South Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan & many more. www.statnews.com/2026/01/09/c...

When it comes to vaccine schedules, the U.S. is now the outlier

A STAT analysis of vaccine recommendations in 38 countries suggests the U.S. is now an outlier.

statnews.com

"[Our current ecosystem] treats shared infrastructure like a free beer rather than a free puppy." An important read on the dangers of open purism, though I'm not sure I agree with the ultimate conclusion. Maybe creative solutions will emerge. rosalynmetz.substack.com/p/openness-h...

Openness Has Limits

Part 4 of a 5-part series on the politics of preservation and power.

rosalynmetz.substack.com

I rarely appreciate a bumper sticker...

petition to make the entire winter as liminal as the space between Christmas and New Years.

Damn, Wendy’s

Zoe Weissman - survivor of 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, FL Mia Tretta - survivor of 2019 Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, CA Both are now students at Brown University in Providence, RI.

The Weekend: Primetime@theweekendprime.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Zoe Weissman, a sophomore at Brown University, joins us to discuss the shooting on Brown's campus in Providence, Rhode Island. She was in middle school in Parkland, Florida during the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. She is now an advocate for gun control and gun violence prevention.

"Reforms should be implemented in a coordinated and collective manner; otherwise, [those] who depart from journal-based metrics may risk a decline in international rankings, thereby reducing their competitiveness [...]." Ay, there's the rub utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/...

Why the Current Model of Academic Publishing Is Ethically Flawed—and What We Can Do to Change It | Journal of Scholarly Publishing

This article offers a reasoned call for urgent reform of the academic journal publishing system. It focuses on the ethical flaws of the current for-profit model. This model enables the transfer of public funds into the profit margins of private companies that add no meaningful value to research and even limit access to knowledge. The article describes how feedback loops in metrics used in the evaluation of scientific publishing exacerbate structural inequalities and make it difficult to break out of the system. Moreover, the opportunity for easy profit attracts dishonest actors and fuels the rise of predatory journals, which in turn corrodes public trust in science. Without systemic reforms, the current system could also undermine artificial intelligence–driven research outcomes by enabling models to be trained on a growing number of substandard scientific publications. The article concludes with ten specific proposals for action, aimed at stimulating further discussion within and beyond academia.

utppublishing.com

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Image screening is going to fail. We need audit trails for data provenance.

Pedro Beltrao@pedrobeltrao.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I tried an even harder example on Gemini Pro image generation and this is quite scary/amazing. I asked for a microscopy image of around 20 HeLa cells, GFP tagged 20% nuclear, 10% membrane, +1 nuclear staining, + overlap. Image below and prompt in the following post.

"The actors with real power are funders (government, foundations) and institutions, who can set the policies that determine what can be published where, and who shape the incentive structures used in promotion and hiring." blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Money, Time, Trust, Control – How commercial publishers drain science - Impact of Social Sciences

Have the interests of commercial publishers now become antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

We have to get serious about identity verification in scientific publishing. It is the fundamental problem at the core of many of the integrity issues we're seeing. I realize this is not straightforward... www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/s...

The Editor Got a Letter From ‘Dr. B.S.’ So Did a Lot of Other Editors.

nytimes.com

RIP Jim Watson. You inspired many of us to pursue a life in research. I wish you had made it easier for us to celebrate your legacy.

I’m finding I’m now at lot less likely to correct my kids’ grammar/phrasing for school assignments. Fuck it - at least it’s obvious they wrote themselves.

Some of y'all have never heard the thing about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good - and it shows.

We just posted an impact story on policies at HHMI, Gates & Astera promoting #OpenAccess #OpenScience #OpenData. Powerful signals to other funders to accelerate discovery in science. Well done @madubs.bsky.social @openaccessmaven.bsky.social @pracheeac.bsky.social! sparcopen.org/impact-story...

Funders Roll Out Next Gen Open Policies - SPARC

sparcopen.org

New blog post. In which I analyze the new HHMI announcement and what it means for the science publishing ecosystem openrxiv.org/preprint-man...

(Part 1) Hear from @hhmi_news Investigator David Stern about his research program and what he's uncovering in the lab. Stern will join the Institute in February 2026, bringing his lab and HHMI appointment to Kansas City. @hhmi.org Read more: bit.ly/4np96Fb

Feeling profound gratitude for my incredible colleagues and getting to play a part in change that really matters. With the Immediate Access to Research policy, we are shifting our focus from journal-curated articles toward researcher-shared preprints. hhmicdn.blob.core.windows.net/policies/Imm...