Doing a PhD is one of the greatest trials you will ever experience in your life. It is physically and mentally grueling, you will be challenged and pushed to the limit every single day, and the pressure levels are so high they will bust you right into the sixth dimension if you’re not prepared or strong […]
For the 3-4 regular readers of this blog, you’re probably aware that a while back we published a paper with F1000Research reviewing the evidence behind the societal, economic, and academic impacts of Open Access. Today, we submitted what I like to think of as the ‘final’ version of that paper. We have taken on an […]
Happy New Year everyone! It’s that time of year when all the summaries of an amazing year of research are coming out, and goodness, what a year it’s been! The folk over at Altmetric have been kind enough to summarise the top 100 articles of 2015, measured by their altmetrics scores – a measure of […]
A few weeks ago, OpenCon hit Brussels in a tidal wave of awesomeness, and led me to thinking about how open access and all that jazz aren’t really about just making papers openly available, but in making the statement that knowledge is something that everyone has equal rights to. Open Science isn’t just a way […]
So a few months ago, I was fortunate enough to be asked to give a talk at the Nature Careers Expo in London about how to use social media to build scientific communities. As part of this, there was a short panel discussion afterwards with myself and Sarah Blackford from the Society for Experimental Biology, […]
For those who haven’t seen, recently a new ‘giant raptor from Hell’ was discovered! As a cousin to the infamous Velociraptor, it represents one of the largest members of the group known as Dromaeosauridae, which were the close relatives of early birds. The new giant raptor lived alongside other beasties like T. rex and comes […]
For junior academics, networking at conferences is both a great opportunity and a terrifying prospect! They offer unparalleled chances to enhance and develop your career, but one false move and you could be doomed for all eternity! Well, not quite, but there are still certain unwritten rules that might help you out a little bit. […]
This was originally posted at: “Postpublication peer review on social media is like the mosh pit at a punk rock conference. It’s fast, uncoordinated, a lot less subtle, more in your face, and involves a few more risks.’ Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific legitimacy – it is the process where research is analysed […]
This was originally posted at http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=1168 What an awful title, eh. Well, you can avoid making this mistake! A recent Guardian post by Conversation UK’s Akshat Rathi (he’s popular on the blog today!) discusses some of the common mistakes in popular science writing and how best to avoid them. It’s fairly general, and by no means […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=1204 In palaeontology, there are so many things more important than dinosaurs. For example, the study of large-scale patterns in the history of life on Earth, commonly known as macroevolution, is all about uncovering patterns of speciation and extinction. We are currently about to enter the sixth mass extinction within the […]