LinkedIn post to hire a new ethics leader with the office of the director.
These are comments that notice the irony.
This is going as well as expected. I can't imagine how managing the director's lack of ethics would be fun. #NIH
A tribute to Alan Wilson. I always enjoyed interacting with him @biologists.bsky.social board meetings, he had great ideas and great passion for science www.biologists.com/stories/a-tr...
In the meantime, experimentation will likely come from smaller publishers willing to test different models for peer review and publishing.
Those experiments may determine the norms of the next generation of scientific publishing.
journals.biologists.com/bio/pages/fa...
The NIH may be moving in this direction. Last year it requested comments on a proposal to cap how much NIH grant money can be used to pay APCs.
Whether or when a policy will emerge is unknown.
If change doesn’t come from reviewers, publishers, or the courts, one remaining lever is for funders to set clearer standards for journals publishing publicly funded research.
At present funders impose few constraints on journal practices. Policies like the NIH Public Access rule regulate access after publication, but not pricing, transparency, or how peer review labor is performed.
Litigation could force structural change, but in this case the courts declined to intervene.
That leaves regulation by research funders.
Demand side: publishers could adopt new models if they believe it improves their product or business.
Across the industry, however, there is little economic pressure pushing publishers to change long-standing practices.
There are at least four possible drivers of change.
Supply side: reviewers could refuse to provide free labor.
In practice this is unlikely because peer review norms (reviewing for free) are deeply embedded in academic culture.
The case raises a broader question: how does change happen in scientific publishing?
In the peer-review labor market, reviewers supply labor and journals demand it, yet the price of that labor has long been set at zero.
A U.S. federal judge dismissed the case. The court ruled that the plaintiffs had not plausibly shown illegal collusion. Similar practices across publishers (like unpaid peer review) were not sufficient evidence of an antitrust conspiracy.
www.reuters.com/legal/govern...
The argument was essentially that scholars provide valuable labor (peer review) for free while publishers generate billions in journal revenue.
The claim: publishers collectively enforce norms that keep peer review unpaid and restrict competition between journals, eg by prohibiting authors from submitting a manuscript to multiple journals at once.
A recent lawsuit against several major academic publishers raises an interesting question: how does change actually happen in scientific publishing?
A group of researchers sued 6 publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer) alleging antitrust violations.
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This is the best press ballet and opera has gotten in America in years
It's crucial to confront the systemic barriers women face in research. This study shows that gender gaps in grant funding persist not because of research quality, but because women receive less favourable assessments as PIs. We can and must change this.
🔗 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
#IWD2026
NIH FY2025 funding data finally emerges on RePORT drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/06/n...
Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.
Yessss!!!!!
He was a great colleague and friend to those of us who worked with him on the company of biologists board over many many years. He loved those trips to Namibia and also flying the plane. So so sad
Me too. Like you, Alan’s work was miles from mine but I got to know him well @biologists.bsky.social
Not only was his biology super-cool but his commitment to the community and his wise judgement always impressed
Condolences to his family and colleagues
Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.
But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.
It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:
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NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US
It's up to us to save science, protect health and defend this democracy!
Stand up! Speak out! Hit the streets on March 7th!
Join us on the streets at rallies nationwide on March 7th.zurl.co/Rcwcl
#ItsUpToUs #standupforscience #rally #March7
See you all tomorrow in Washington DC. @cdelawalla.bsky.social @standupforscience.bsky.social @michaelmann.bsky.social
I've brought the same issues up at Company of Biologists board meetings. During these unprecedented times, scientific societies should be thinking clearly & working together to improve science publishing
Congrats! She's not just a Sloan Fellow and an amazing scientist, she's also one of the academic editors @biologyopen.bsky.social
First time I see a journal paying its reviewers.
Great move of @biologyopen.bsky.social! 👏👏👏
Probably, being a society-owned journal makes a difference 😉
These winter games have nothing on Texas. The most dangerous professional sport in the world is rodeo bull riding.
Yes, we are doing that analysis for 2025. Was not in 2024 data because sample size too small (& half the pool couldn’t say no due to how the contract was structured).
Sounds like a 'Stop Passing the Harasser' policy could have been helpful www.nationalacademies.org/read/26565
