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Richard Sever

@richardsever.bsky.social
16K followers 426 following 3K posts

Chief Science and Strategy Officer, openRxiv. Co-Founder, bioRxiv and medRxiv.

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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
New repository for math designed for the AI era. A key differentiator is apparently that authors aren't expected necessarily to understand/have performed the work in the way arXiv, etc would require. 1/2 hexagonmath.org
hexagonmath.org
Hexagon
A repository for research-level works in the mathematical sciences and theoretical computer science.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
As I said here, complaints about journal behavior mistake a symptom for the cause www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/acad...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Noise/useless science rather than AI slop is a current challenge: "If medical schools and universities don't want the literature to be overwhelmed with garbage, they should stop giving every applicant ... an incentive to publish a lot of crap." www.medpagetoday.com/special-repo...
medpagetoday.com
Is AI Flooding Medical Journals With 'Meaningless' Research?
'It's not fraudulent, and it's not really slop,' one expert says
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Wolfgang Huber @wkhuber.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The economics of attention and friction are shifting.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Wonderful day at UIUC talking with faculty and trainees and giving two seminars on preprints and careers. But the highlight was definitely Zaida Luthey-Schulten taking me through their work modeling JCV’s minimal cell youtu.be/EQ2ywYhYs5Y?...
youtu.be
Full life cycle 4D simulation of minimal bacterial cell
YouTube video by Beckman Institute at Illinois
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Great visit to Northwestern. Thanks to my hosts Nav Chandel and Kathy Green. Fascinating history and a view to be envious of.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
AI discovery of new enzymes "not a breakthrough...a wrinkle on what we know" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/s...
nytimes.com
Anthropic’s A.I. Is Teaching Itself Biology. Now It’s Made Its First Discovery.
Scientists at the company announced their first finding: a group of enzymes whose function is unknown.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"machine created pieces of knowledge...no authorship, no credit to the tokens...or the matrix that solved, but perhaps rather a diffuse credit going to the prior work...All good until that hill rises beyond our horizon of memory" via @ianmulvany.bsky.social blog.mulvany.net/posts/what-w...
blog.mulvany.net
What, who? Identity problems are biting — Ian Mulvany
I gave a talk last year the focussed on the long term problems that we are running into because our identity model in scholarly publishing is not fit for…
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Image manipulation at Stanford in "misleading depiction of racial diversity" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/u...
nytimes.com
Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo
Universities have been accused of doctoring photos to showcase diversity in the past. In this case, a Black woman replaced a Hispanic young man, who said it was upsetting to be “erased.”
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
GIGO concerns: "we are optimistic about AI [but] worry we [will] overlook the fundamental ingredients of scientific innovation...out-of-the-box thinking combined with rigorous experimentation...Data quality — not quantity — determines the quality of AI predictions." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Scientific culture in the age of AI - Nature Cell Biology
Recent changes in Genentech’s scientific organization, occurring as the company makes artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly central to its research strategy, highlight a broader question facing bi...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Publishing alchemy turning diamonds into gold... www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Hundreds of ‘free’ academic journals have started charging fees
A study tracking diamond open-access journals has found an increase in titles switching to other publishing models — especially over the past few years.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"one can’t help but think there’s perhaps an unsubtle critique of the academic career and funding system inherent in a prolific researcher publicly stating that their own publications are both too abundant and not worth reading even for their own students" scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/09/23/a...
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
AI and Scholarly Reading: Foxes versus Hedgehogs - The Scholarly Kitchen
Some readers are foxes, and some are hedgehogs. What kind of reader is AI, and how will that impact both the practice of science and the business of journal publishing?
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Alejandro Montenegro @aemonten.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Ira Herskowitz is credited with the use of the arrow and T bar to indicate positive and negative regulation, respectively
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
"authors could not answer...even basic questions about the paper...difficult to see how they could have verified the paper’s contents" medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...
medium.com
Asking Authors About Their Own Papers
By Nihar B. Shah
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Data provenance needs to be a thing...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I’ve been at so many meetings over the years where a ‘future of the scientific paper’ has been confidently asserted that never actually comes to pass that I’ve become desensitised to the claim 🤣
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Jason Kindrachuk @kindrachukjason.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Very happy to see this preprint out on undocumented mpox virus exposures and the role of stigma in influencing health-seeking behaviour. Huge thank you to all study participants, community organization, and our academic partners in Canada and beyond www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
medrxiv.org
Community-based assessment of mpox seroprevalence and undocumented exposures in Manitoba and Alberta, Canada
During the 2022 global mpox outbreak, gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM) were disproportionately affected,s however, the true number of cases is likely higher than reported due ...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
"any answer to 'is AI good for science' that neatly fits into a single yes or no is unserious...here is an invitation to join the real discussion" Thoughtful piece by @blekhman.bsky.social on a subject that provokes knee-jerk responses for and against. blekhman.substack.com/p/the-ai-dis...
blekhman.substack.com
The AI Discourse in Academia is Toxic. It Doesn’t have to be.
You are allowed to have a nuanced opinion about AI
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This may be the real challenge: volume rather than fraud
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Thomas Dietterich @tdietterich.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
A lesson from decades of work on automation is that autonomous systems require continual monitoring and human oversight. System designers never(*) succeed in anticipating all of the ways that a system can fail.
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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
There are so many holes in these literatures that the LLMs are not good at assessing the strength of the evidence that is available, or identifying what questions are both important and actionable.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
"All corners of academia will soon be flooded with AI-generated research....Maths and CS go first because their entire output is symbol manipulation...Biology comes later not because biologists are cleverer but because the rate-limiting step is physical" giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...
giorgio.gilest.ro
The Weimar of knowledge – la bottega
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The DOI registration agency Crossref is holding elections for Board Members. I've worked with Crossref for years, and preprints are now a major class of object registered. IMO it's valuable to have that experience represented so am a candidate. Vote for me! www.crossref.org/board-and-go...
crossref.org
Board election 2026 candidates - Crossref
Help elect the incoming class of 2027 Crossref board members
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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I was going to use the new Leopardus tilcayo cat discovery as a jumping off point for a thread on challenges & controversies of defining what a species is. But then I got lost in this little floofy guy's eyes & all was forgotten.
This 10-year-old male tiger cat is the first of his species (named Leopardus tilcayo) known to science. He is approximately 18 inches from head to end of body and weighs only 3 pounds, making him smaller than the average domestic cat. While scientists first encountered this cat a decade ago, it took recent advanced genomic analysis to confirm it as a new species. The photograph was taken at the Senda Verde Animal Refuge in Bolivia’s Yungas region, where he currently resides. Credit: Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is an important point. As I say here about preprints, "A fraudulent contribution has the potential to be surfaced for years to come. A transparent public record helps preserve accountability and should be a significant disincentive to breach trust". openrxiv.org/trust-signal...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Bear in mind I have been joking of supplementary data for years that it is "Unreviewed, unindexed and unread". AI may mean it's time has finally come...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Fascinating paper applying pop gen math to AI model evolution and population genetics (TLDR: you can) arxiv.org/abs/2609.18560 I'm not smart or knowledgeable enough to really appreciate it but another interesting aspect is a dedicated explanation for biologists 1/n arxiv.org/src/2609.185...
arxiv.org
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Bloom lab @jbloomlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We have measured 47,851 neutralization titers of current human sera vs current influenza strains to inform vaccine update & analyses of viral evolution. New H1N1 strains (eg, D.3.1.1 + G155E) have reduced neutralization, as do some H3N2 subclade K descendants. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Near real-time data on the human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza virus in summer of 2026 shows antigenic advance of H3N2 subclade K region D mutants and H1N1 D.3.1.1 Sa mutants
Human seasonal influenza evolves rapidly, necessitating twice yearly decisions about whether to update the strains in the vaccine. To help inform this decision, we have been using high-throughput sequ...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I rarely dip into twitter these days but I do miss the juxtapositions 🤣 @phylogenomics.bsky.social
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"mathematicians express extreme concern about the pace of development of AI and the implications of this for civilisation... believe this is an emergency, and call on the Royal Society to use its influence to convey this view to government and the media." docs.google.com/document/d/1...
docs.google.com
Open Letter to Paul Nurse
Open Letter to Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society Dear Paul We, as mathematicians, write to express our extreme concern about the pace of development of AI and the implications of this f...
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Kristian G. Andersen @kgandersen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"Pennsylvania’s Measles Outbreak Is Enormous". Indeed it is. Given 4 _reported_ deaths from measles and given a 0.1% - 0.3% CFR, the true number of cases - currently reported at 731 - is likely a couple/few thousand. That is big - and 100% vaccine preventable. www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...
theatlantic.com
Pennsylvania’s Measles Outbreak Is Enormous
The two latest deaths suggest that the true number of infections is much larger than reported.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"eLife has been without an impact factor for just over a year...and [has] an overall 21% decrease in revenue" newsletter.journalology.com/p/journalolo... Perhaps the only more stark illustration of academia's addiction to Impact Factor is this:
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Deeply saddened to learn of the death of my colleague Terri Grodzicker. She was an amazing molecular biologist who did fundamental work on adenovirus. Many will know her as the charismatic long-time editor of Genes & Development and organizer of CSHL meetings 1/2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_G...
en.wikipedia.org
Terri Grodzicker - Wikipedia
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Yup. Some folks literally think reporters and editors and publishers should do their work totally without a wage 🤷‍♂️
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I guess this is where it all happens
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Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
These pictures of REAL chromatin in vivo will both blow your mind and blow out of the water those textbook diagrams of "higher order nucleosome structures"
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Nonia Pariente @npariente.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Experimenting with new models of peer review is essential to move to a future of #publishing that better serves science and researchers ⬇️ DiscoveryStack is an interesting attempt, aiming to separate the assessment of quality & impact @maxkrummel.bsky.social @richardsever.bsky.social 🧪
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Fields Medalists: "how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we don't lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve...whether these changes benefit the field or have a destructive effect will in large part be determined by the decisions of the humans in control" mathandai.org
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
At the same time folks were fast and lose with ringing the “science is broken” bell, and if it’s rung loud enough and long this is who comes to dinner. Science is, of course, not broken as we’ve seen with enduring from operation warp speed to LIGO.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"chilling examples of state-sponsored biological weapons developers tapping into the rapidly advancing capabilities of leading AI models" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/u...
nytimes.com
Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons
In a new report, the A.I. start-up added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
A paper, challenged by a preprint, discussed by the community. The future of peer review? Lots to think about here - from epistasis to AI to how we review science. ht @prelights.bsky.social
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Prof Jenny Rohn @jennyrohn.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
So not surprising, eh @microberamon.bsky.social @friendlymicrobe.bsky.social ?
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
“Professional editors make it their job to familiarize themselves with trajectories of research…they actually read all of the papers they handle…they’re extremely well suited to decide when progress should be summarized, questions of scientific rigor” 1/n journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
journals.biologists.com
Apocalypse? Nah! Part II – two roads diverge
Heaven, Heaven is a place. A place where nothing, nothing ever happens. David ByrneHi there! I hope it is nice where you are; where I am is indeed lovely today! If you are just joining us, we've been ...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
You can now update bioRxiv/medRxiv preprints with funding information after the fact. Authors often omit/don't have all funding info when submitting, but funders understandably want it there. This solves the problem without requiring you to submit a whole new paper. openrxiv.org/updating-fun...
openrxiv.org
Updating funder information on preprints - openRxiv
For the past year, bioRxiv and medRxiv authors have been able to include funder information with their preprints. This can be entered in a dedicated field during the submission process, using Research...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Saddened to learn of the death of Ada Yonath. Her work on ribosome structure and function and antibiotic mechanisms was an immense contribution to biology. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Yon...
en.wikipedia.org
Ada Yonath - Wikipedia
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Very important point. Of course, it's perfectly acceptable to make fun of someone for use/misuse of words like "irregardless, "disinterested" or "literally", which they learned by not reading.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
This key lesson told wonderfully in this old Mole article about Las Meninas journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
journals.biologists.com
Eyes on the prize
I've been thinking big the last day or two. “Big” as in “big questions.” And of course, always bringing things into Mole-sized perspective so my poor insectivore brain could grasp it, I, as so often a...
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
"When you find yourself writing such a statement about a topic you’re not an expert in, there are only two possibilities: 1. You are not talking to the right people. 2. You are talking to the right people but you’re not listening" blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/im-sorry-y...
blog.genesmindsmachines.com
I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus
God save us from economists who think they can competently talk about biology
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Map wars...
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Gen Wojcik @genandgenes.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
The first requires understanding people where there are, whether is because of genetics, environment, or a combination of both, and acting accordingly. The latter has no place in our society.
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