The way we publish scientific findings has stayed surprisingly rigid for something so central to progress. The standard IMRaD format originated in the 19th century, with Louis Pasteur being an early a...

Nowadays, many journals are openly sharing the peer review reports for the articles they publish. If the report is there, it will be the first thing I read, even before looking at the actual results i...

✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by David del Álamo. David earned his PhD in Madrid studying fly wing genetics, then continued his developmental biology research as a postdoc in New York and Paris. After that, he stepped into the dark side of science becoming an editor for The

✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by David del Álamo. David earned his PhD in Madrid studying fly wing genetics, then continued his developmental biology research as a postdoc in New Yor...

For the past two decades, a lot of innovation has lived under the broad umbrella of the “open” movement. When people talk about openness today, they usually mean things like open source software or op...

We are familiar with the “fraud in science” stories that make the headlines. Those are the ones that are the most unacceptable, dramatic and scandalous. They usually emerge after years and years of be...

Last week, we talked about the importance of choosing a good supervisor to oversee your work, whether it’s for your bachelor’s /master’s thesis or your PhD. That piece of advice sounds wonderful just ...

When we get the ball rolling in academia, we often find ourselves just eager for an opportunity. You apply for your bachelor's or master's thesis and hope for the best, fantasising about the day a PI ...

History holds many lessons that we repeatedly ignore. One such lesson is about the concentration of power. When power concentrates around infrastructure that everyone depends on, accountability erodes...

This is a list coming straight from my experience and it is NOT a listicle (I hate that word. And the concept.). Just putting it out there, that I wish.. ..I had written a review in my field BEFORE ...

There are many academia-specific keywords: “grant”, “stipend”, “precarity”. But what is the correct designation for the leader of a research group who writes projects, manages people, supervises stude...

If you ever wondered what the academic equivalent of “the common child’s nightmare of going to school while in your pyjamas” is, chances are most researchers under 40 years old will respond the same: ...

If only we fixed the publishing system. If only we fixed the incentives, rewards and recognition. Open Science (OS) likes to position itself as a systems problem. And whilst these things do matter, de...

“I spent the holidays in the lab.” “I started at 5.00 this morning.” Have you ever had that person in your team that made sure to explicitly share that they have been working during crazy hours, eve...

For most of human history, science has been communicated through the spoken word. Knowledge moved from person to person through oral storytelling and apprenticeship style training. Writing helped to f...

Researchers are people of science, of facts, of specifics. With the duty of being unbiased, they set their assumptions aside and prioritize what the data tells them above everything else. And yet, whe...

The first step of alcoholics anonymous is to admit you have an addiction (or so the many TV shows tell me). Well, I’m a scientist and science has an addiction. It’s an addiction that every scientist h...

There was another lab working on our “favorite” protein. Not in our building, and not even in our time zone but our questions and models were quite similar. We knew of them through the usual channels:...

✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Catharina Sänger. With a curious mind and a passport full of lab stamps, Catharina has explored science across the globe. She studied Biochemistry in...

✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Catharina Sänger. With a curious mind and a passport full of lab stamps, Catharina has explored science across the globe. She studied Biochemistry in...

“With the rising competition for funding, securing a grant has become less about advancing science and more about staying in science.” ↪ Mentioned recently in a Nature News article.  As you may know...

✒️Editor's Note: Today's guest post was written by Altynai Mambetova. Altynai holds a Master's degree in Data Science from the University of Manchester. Her background spans data journalism to data ar...

Disclaimer I will speak from my own experience and from what I know the most — the case of being a (European) cisgender woman in academia. I don’t claim to represent or fully understand the struggles...

Open Science (OS) is a movement that aims to bring about a change to the academic publishing system. Yet, despite being around for over 30 years, it has had relatively limited success. Traditional pub...

When I first started my PhD in France, I couldn’t help but address my PI with the formal “you” in french (“vous”), instead of the informal “you” (“tu”). She was very quick to tell me to use the inform...

We’ve all peeked at that “Received, Revised, Accepted” section of a paper and instantly regretted it. Those dates often read less like a timeline and more like an archaeological record. And that, kids...

… gotcha! You clicked because the title sounded extraordinary, revolutionary, amazing — didn’t it? And for a while, I found myself reacting the same way you just did. Then, spending a good hour read...

“So, what experiment should we do next?” asks the student.  And two different tabs open up side to side in your mind.  Tab 1: Taking a stroll in your field In this tab, there are no real rules. Yo...

The current system of recognition in academia is built on a single pillar; publishing. Career advancement is dependent on how much and where you publish. Assessment of “quality” is based on extremely ...

The rise of Large Language Models in academic writing. Postdoctoral researcher Dr Verena Haage was reviewing a manuscript for a reputable neuroscience journal when she began to notice unusual incon...

By the end of my PhD, I was somewhat disillusioned by the way scientific research worked and decided to pick a field that could open up a (small) door to industry, if I ever decided to take that route...

Meet Larry, the Scientific Cat Larry — a fluffy, slightly overweight cat — has achieved what many postdocs or even professors only dream of: becoming the most cited “author” in his field. Obviously, ...

If doing your job requires constant applications to keep doing it, is that really a “job”?  Why do we need to keep “auditioning” for work we’re already performing? Let’s first agree that there isn’t...

We all know this person. Or we are this person. You troubleshoot broken connections in the lab, fix the department printer, teach undergrads how to use the Nanodrop and pH-meter, and share all your be...

Six years ago, during a science communication session at a conference, we were given the task to explain “why we do what we do” to people unfamiliar with our research. While having this chat with a fe...

So far we have dived into the historical origins of the peer review concept and the earliest attempts at an external referee system used by the Royal Society. Even in this early exploration, we have e...

Peer review is a staple of science, a seemingly inescapable barrier that every researcher must cross in order to share their work with the world. The internet is awash with complaints about Reviewer #...

Being a researcher implies a long stretch of studies at the university to specialize in a certain field. To me personally, it felt like I just kept studying and studying, year after year, and… here I ...

Before starting - what is Omics Data? Omics data represent massive volumes of information on genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes — you name it. They’ve become a favorite among researchers, reviewers,...

The “publish or perish” culture pushes researchers to publish papers (regardless of the state of their research) for career survival. Academic jobs are tied to people’s publication records; and althou...

Two years ago at a conference, I was talking to a professor whom I deeply respect, telling him that I honestly do not know where my home is. I left the country I grew up in when I was 18, spent 11 yea...

For my very first blog post on this platform, I got inspired by the name of the blog support system itself—Ghost. It made me reflect on a phenomenon that many early-career researchers quietly experien...

Impact factor. The power of this term is unparalleled in academia. The word “impact” by itself is already so profoundly heavy. And second in line to it, would be tenure. I put it in second place, bec...

I know you are conditioned to think that what you are researching has to be novel.  But let’s think about it for a second.  Is the importance of novelty and the constant push for it in publications ...

Act I: Enchantment It usually starts early on.  You are looking at something. A couple of bugs on the ground. A star in the sky. The veins on a leaf. The stream of bubbles in your soda. You are just...

How to catch a predator in the academic publisher quagmire.  Dear esteemed Professor Waltho, I would like to take the privilege to invite you to contribute your research/discoveries to our overly op...

In the 20th century, Tom Clancy’s espionage novels became so popular that his publisher started hiring ghostwriters to respond to the popular demand. But in science, such a thing would be unthinkable,...