The Curious Engineer

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bjoern.brembs.blog

bjoern.brembs.net

The blog of neurobiologist Björn Brembs

ScienceSociety / politics / economy

’15’20’25
Posts
213 from 11 May 2013 to 9 Jul 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
http://bjoern.brembs.net/feed/

2026 4

  1. Posters on molecular mediators of learning, dopamine and habit formation at #FENS2026
  2. After decades of debating the “scientific publishing crisis”, the time has come to decide.
  3. Retraction data are still useless – almost
  4. Procurement Before Prestige

2025 4

  1. Motor learning mechanisms at #SfN25
  2. Edgewise
  3. Embrace the uncertainty
  4. We are hiring!

2024 8

  1. By their actions you shall know them
  2. Research assessment: new panels, new luck?
  3. Motor learning at #SfN24
  4. What is a decision?
  5. Whodathunk? Motor learning in motor neurons, huh?
  6. We are looking for a PhD student
  7. How reliable is the scholarly literature?
  8. The speed (or lack thereof) of science

2023 8

  1. Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot
  2. German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?
  3. Heading for #SfN23 with two posters
  4. No Evilsevier DEAL!
  5. Is this Smits’ tripleC moment?
  6. The beginning of the end for academic publishers?
  7. Should you trust Elsevier?
  8. How about paying extra for peer-review?

2022 10

  1. What if Greta Thunberg took a Shell-sponsored professorship?
  2. Interacting learning systems at SfN22
  3. Open Access and the incentives for embezzlement
  4. Scholarly societies partly to blame for post-truth age?
  5. Off to Paris for #FENS2022 with two posters
  6. EU: academic publishers are monopolists
  7. Scholarship has no time to waste
  8. Why publication services must not be negotiated
  9. Replacing the prestige signal
  10. Small changes, big effects

2021 8

  1. Academic publishing – market or collectivization?
  2. Prioritizing academic publishers
  3. The trinity of failures
  4. Algorithmic employment decisions in academia?
  5. What sinister time machine?
  6. Minimizing the collective action problem
  7. Scholarly publishing in three cartoons
  8. Can funders mandate institutions?

2020 9

  1. High APCs are a feature, not a bug
  2. Are Nature’s APCs ‘outrageous’ or ‘very attractive’?
  3. Is the SNSI the new PRISM?
  4. Come and do research with us!
  5. How academic institutions neglect their duty
  6. Why do academic institutions seem stuck in 1995?
  7. Who’s responsible for the lack of action?
  8. Tagging and knocking out FoxP with CRISPR/Cas9
  9. The ultimate Open Access timeline

2019 10

  1. Elsevier now officially a “predatory” publisher
  2. With CRISPRed FoxP and habit formation to #SfN19
  3. Scholarship has bigger fish to fry than access
  4. Is Open Access headed for a cost explosion?
  5. Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon
  6. Unpersuadables: When scientists dismiss science for political reasons
  7. New OSTP director caught lying in interview
  8. New England Journal of Medicine – and you thought Nature was expensive?
  9. How publishers keep fooling academics
  10. Providing recommendations for Plan S implementation

2018 8

  1. Maybe try another kind of mandate?
  2. Dopamine in optogenetic self-stimulation and CRISPR editing of FoxP
  3. Automated Linked Open Data Publishing
  4. Does academic freedom entail exemption from spending rules?
  5. After 24 years, when will academic culture finally shift?
  6. Why open access Big Deals are worse than subscriptions
  7. Come work with us!
  8. Why academic journals need to go

2017 13

  1. Is a cost-neutral transition to open access realistic?
  2. The scholarly commons: from profiteering to servicing
  3. Why can Elsevier keep insulting scholars without consequences?
  4. With the access issue temporarily solved, what now?
  5. Come do research with us!
  6. 7 functionalities the scholarly literature should have
  7. Looking for a PhD student
  8. Why I march
  9. How to convince faculty to support subscription cancellations
  10. Please address these concerns before we can accept your #OA proposal
  11. Are we inadvertently supporting the defunding of public science?
  12. Data structures for Open Science
  13. Open Science: Too much talk, too little action

2016 23

  1. Why did the moth fly into the flame?
  2. So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?
  3. Should public institutions not be choosing the lowest responsible bidder?
  4. Do flies in groups make individual choices?
  5. Practical roads to infrastructure reform
  6. What interacting with publishers felt like for this open access proponent
  7. Peer-review is not free – it’s a subsidy for publishers
  8. Recommendations for future #scifoo invitees
  9. Why haven’t we already canceled all subscriptions?
  10. On the productivity of scientists
  11. Academic publishers and competition
  12. In which a Science editorial demonstrates the ineffectiveness of OA activism
  13. Data show “excellence initiative” was a massive failure – help stop it
  14. How gold open access may make things worse
  15. Have you seen this response to terrorism anywhere?
  16. Seeking your endorsement
  17. How do academic publishers see their role?
  18. Academic publishers: stop access negotiations
  19. Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
  20. Earning credibility in post-factual science?
  21. Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science
  22. Just how widespread are impact factor negotiations?
  23. How much should a scholarly article cost the taxpayer?

2015 28

  1. How free are academics, really?
  2. How to write your grant proposal?
  3. Why cutting down on peer-review will improve it
  4. Data Diving for Genomics Treasure
  5. Guest post: Why our Open Data project worked
  6. Don’t be afraid of open data
  7. Chance in animate nature, day 3
  8. Chance in animate nature, day 2
  9. Chance in animate nature, day 1
  10. Predatory Priorities
  11. So many symptoms, only one disease: a public good in private hands
  12. Evidence-resistant science leaders?
  13. Whither now, Open Access?
  14. What happens to publishers that don’t maximize their profit?
  15. Are more retractions due to more scrutiny?
  16. What goes into making a scientific manuscript public?
  17. Is this supposed to be the best Elsevier can muster?
  18. A study justifying waste of tax-funds?
  19. What should a modern scientific infrastructure look like?
  20. If only all science were this reproducible
  21. Nature reviewers endorse hype
  22. Why this GlamMag will likely not ask for my review again
  23. Is DIY really just for the scholarly poor?
  24. Watching a paradigm shift in neuroscience
  25. How not to contact faculty as student
  26. Publishers, stop torturing your reviewers!
  27. Random Science Video: The value of fly research
  28. Booming university administrations

2014 22

  1. In which scientists behave like rats in a Skinner box
  2. How important is the Impact Factor?
  3. How Nature Magazine consistently prefers anecdote over data
  4. Humanized FoxP2 and the timing of habits
  5. Are we paying US$3000 per article just for paywalls?
  6. The way academic publishing should be
  7. Why use fruit flies to study a gene involved in language?
  8. The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning
  9. No need to only send your best work to Science Magazine
  10. Your university is definitely paying too much for journals
  11. If you comment online, you’re on stage
  12. Conflicts of interest even for ‘good’ scholarly publishers
  13. Recursive fury: Resigning from Frontiers
  14. FIRST: the Research Works Act all over again
  15. Even the most thorough peer-review at the ‘best’ journals not up to snuff?
  16. Interested in testing an RSS reader for science?
  17. What is the difference between text, data and code?
  18. How scientific are scientists, really?
  19. Two evolutionary conserved, fundamental learning mechanisms
  20. Hiding the shoulders of giants?
  21. In support of subscripton cancellations
  22. Citation inflation and incompetent scientists

2013 58

  1. [updated]Churchland: “Ignore science and live a make-believe life!”
  2. The Achilles’ heel of open access mandates
  3. Not to be outdone, Nature Magazine rejects data, publishes opinion
  4. Almost 80 years on, progress on operant and classical conditioning
  5. How embarrassing was the ‘journal sting’ for Science Magazine?
  6. Science Magazine rejects data, publishes anecdote
  7. All agree: there is no need for the publisher’s authorized version
  8. Is de Gruyter’s lobby-by-proxy not lobbyism?
  9. The cost of the rejection-resubmission cycle
  10. Retiring from science?
  11. Special issue on publishing reform?
  12. Video: Free will as an evolved brain function
  13. The cost of knowledge – in 2003?
  14. How to recharge in Sweden
  15. Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science
  16. The danger of universal gold open access
  17. Flashback: Programming Free Will – creative robots
  18. Libraries are better than corporate publishers because…
  19. Flashback: The brain creates something out of nothing
  20. A fistful of dollars: why corporate publishers have no place in scholarly communication
  21. Scientists as social parasites?
  22. Flashback: All brains possess free will because there is no design in biology
  23. Flashback: Noise in the brain?
  24. Science, red in tooth and claw
  25. Flashback: Nothing new in science?
  26. Scientific discoveries are like orgasms: you can’t have any bad ones
  27. Flashback: Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat!
  28. Neither gold, nor green, nor hybrid are sustainable open access models
  29. Flashback: The neurobiology of operant conditioning
  30. SummerScienceVideo: science is real
  31. 12 year anniversary of angry letter to scientific journal editor
  32. Flashback: What can the spine teach us about learning?
  33. SummerScienceVideo: fruit fly research
  34. In which potatoes in France are like high-ranking journals in science
  35. Flashback: ‘stimulus-response’ concept based on artifacts?
  36. Solutions to the looming crisis in science
  37. Publisher selects the best open access science – authors complain
  38. Tweetlog: fruit flies, evolution and #openaccess
  39. Brains as output/input systems
  40. The Conversation: The looming crisis in science
  41. Flashback: The neurobiology of self-learning
  42. Tweetlog: neuroscience and #openaccess
  43. …and now for some lock-picking cockatoos
  44. The dysfunctionality of the scholarly literature: hyperlinks
  45. Trying a new feature: Tweetlog
  46. Amazing bead chain experiment
  47. #icanhazpdf more public than a publication?
  48. Funder mandates: Are scientists like junkies?
  49. Free will: it’s not what you think it is
  50. One more reason to publish negative results
  51. SHARE: Library-based publishing becoming a reality?
  52. Everybody already knows journal rank is bunk
  53. Cut out the parasitic middle men!
  54. Dissecting a fly’s course control system
  55. A wonderful example of Open Science
  56. PostDoc opportunity in our lab now advertized
  57. Official call for an end to journal rank
  58. A new home for bjoern.brembs.blog