There’s a fascinating shift going on in scientific publishing, as our fundamental model for who pays for the necessary apparatus of journals shifts from subscribers to authors. The shift is slow (because the way science is funded isn’t set up very well to facilitate such a shift), and bits of it spark outrage (just last […]

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OK, not that sort of introduction. Last week I was drafting the Introduction to a new paper*, and I was struggling. People often assume that because I’ve written a book about scientific writing, I must be a gifted writer to whom the task comes easily. Nothing could be further from the truth: I’m just like […]

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I made scones this morning, and it made me think about statistics, and about thinking. No, really, I have a point: it’s that P = 0.05 and a teaspoon of baking powder are the same thing, in an important way. Am I stretching an analogy to its breaking point? Read on to find out. My […]

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If your university is like mine, it has a strategic plan. It put hundreds of hours of work (some of them yours!) into developing it, consulting widely and wordsmithing through dozens of drafts. It shouted excitedly about the release of the plan, and how it prepares the university as a leader into the future. And […]

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People are doing something weird: they’re buying my book. The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, I mean – it’s not weird at all that people are buying Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider. (So please keep buying that one. It’s fun, I swear.*) But The Scientist’s Guide: people are still buying it (I can tell […]

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If your email inbox is like mine, you’ve seen more than a few invitations like the one above. There are thousands of “journals” offering to publish pretty much anything, without peer review or with only the pretence of it. They tend not to bother with such things as copy-editing or secured long-term web hosting either […]

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This is my 500th post on Scientist Sees Squirrel*, and my goodness, that’s quite the logorrheic accomplishment. When I started this blog, back in January of 2015, I really didn’t know where it was going. (Like many of my major life decisions, starting a blog wasn’t thoroughly thought out.) It’s astonishing to me that I’m […]

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This is my 500th post on Scientist Sees Squirrel*, and my goodness, that’s quite the logorrheic accomplishment. When I started this blog, back in January of 2015, I really didn’t know where it was going. (Like many of my major life decisions, starting a blog wasn’t thoroughly thought out.) It’s astonishing to me that I’m […]

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Something a bit different today: this post is mostly just a link to a piece I’ve just published on jobs.ac.uk. There, I ask why early-career folks might get involved in peer reviewing, given that they aren’t paid to review (unlike many, if not most, more senior academics, for whom reviewing is part of the service […]

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Something a bit different today: this post is mostly just a link to a piece I’ve just published on jobs.ac.uk. There, I ask why early-career folks might get involved in peer reviewing, given that they aren’t paid to review (unlike many, if not most, more senior academics, for whom reviewing is part of the service […]

Continue reading