flynn002

How Einstein dealt with peer review: from http://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-einstein-did-too-27405 This all started with a tweet from Jesse Shapiro under the #shareyourrejections hashtag: JS: Reviewer 2: “The best thing these authors [me and @ejalm] could do to benefit this field of study would be to leave the field and never work on this topic again.” Paraphrasing only slightly. This was quickly followed by another example ; Bill Hanage: #ShareYourRejections “this paper is not suitable for publication in PNAS, or indeed anywhere.” Now, both of these are similarly damning, but there is an important difference. The first one criticises the authors, the second one criticises the paper. Several people replied to Jesse’s tweet with sympathy, for instance: Jenny Rohn : My condolences. But Reviewer 2 is shooting him/herself in the foot - most sensible editors will take a referee's opinion less seriously if it's laced with ad hominem attacks. I took a differen...

An interesting twitter thread came along yesterday, started by this query from Jan Wessel (@wessel_lab): Quick thread of (honest) questions for the numerous people on here that subscribe to the position that sharing code in MATLAB ($) is bad open-science practice compared to open source languages (e.g., Python). What should I do as a PI that runs a lab whose entire coding structure is based (publicly shared) MATLAB code? Some say I should learn an open-source language and change my lab’s procedures over to it. But how would that work in practice?  When I resort to blogging, it’s often because someone has raised a question that has captured my interest because it does not have a simple answer. I have made a Twitter moment to store the rest of Jan’s thread and some of the responses to it, as they raise important points which have broad application. In part, this is an argument about costs and benefits to the individual scientist and the community. Sometimes these can be aligned, bu...

Helpful advice from the World Bank This blogpost was prompted by a funding call announced this week by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)  , which included the following key dates: Opening date for proposals – 6 August 2018  Closing date for proposals – 18 September 2018  PI response invited – 23 October 2018  PI response due – 29 October 2018  Panel – 3 December 2018  Grants start – 14 February 2019  As pointed out by Adam Golberg (@cash4questions), Research Development Manager at Nottingham University, on Twitter, this is very short notice to prepare an application for substantial funding: I make this about 30 working days notice. For a call issued in August. For projects of 36 months, up to £900k - substantial, for social sciences. With only one bid allowed to be led from each institution, so likely requiring an internal sift.  I thought it worth raising this with ESRC, and they replied promptly, saying: To access funds for this c...