ewcspottesmith.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

The open access movement has been captured by the publishers, and the journal system is worse than ever. Suggestions like open review do nothing to make research or peer review better, nothing to break the bullshit of rewarding people for simply publishing, right or wrong. Where is our courage?

submitted 1 day ago • 12 comments

Come and join us. Lecturer position available in Inorganic and Materials Chemistry at @uclchemistry.bsky.social in London, open to experimental, theoretical, computational, & digital inorganic and materials chemists with big ideas. Please share ! Deadline 24-June www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Social media screening rules for all student and scholar US visa applicants.... www.state.gov/releases/off...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results. t.co/JXeTALBPds

submitted 1 day ago • 46 comments

I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12

submitted 1 day ago • 21 comments

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays. Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process is how they learn. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

submitted 2 days ago • 207 comments

Breaking: The Trevor Project received a stop-work order last night on its contract with the national 988 suicide prevention hotline. The Trump administration is eliminating the option for LGBTQ callers to the hotline to press 3 and connect with someone who specializes in LGBTQ mental health.

submitted 2 days ago • 260 comments

Introducing 'sane-heteroprofessionalism': A critical lens on how professionalism in higher education marginalises queer, trans & m/Mad subjectivities. 🎓🌈 🔗https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681366.2024.2418096 Feel free to share!

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

fuck Supreme Court released Skrmetti Roberts opinion, liberals dissent the awful outcome--blessing anti-trans discrimination--isnt in and of itself surprising, but it's a bit stunning the way they're pretending the Equal Protection Clause isn't even relevant www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

submitted 2 days ago • 22 comments

Thought it was supposed to be women who are ruining science 🤨 “male first authors have higher retraction rates, particularly for scientific misconduct such as plagiarism, authorship disputes, ethical issues, duplication, and fabrication/falsification”

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

What's daily life like for an LGBTQ+ scientist in 2025? 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ We spoke to @oliviagoldman.net of @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social to ask about being ‘out & proud’ in the lab and why openness is vital for science: ow.ly/pL8W50WaIpK #Pride #PrideMonth #PrideMonth2025 #prideinSTEM #outinSTEM #queerinSTEM

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3

submitted 4 days ago • 83 comments

New AAUP Report out today: real average salaries for continuing & new full-time faculty have increased but have not recovered from pre-pandemic levels. The last two years of progress weren’t enough to recover from three consecutive years of decline. 🧵

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

We have the Senate Finance Committee text for the One Big, Beautiful Bill. Like the House bill, it includes a prohibition on Medicaid being used for gender transition care. Full text here www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

submitted 4 days ago • 6 comments

NEW: Statement from the PCI RR Managing Board on the withdrawal of Infant and Child Development as a PCI RR-friendly journal, and the decision by Wiley to refuse preprints that have been peer-reviewed by @peercommunityin.bsky.social / @pci-regreports.bsky.social Read here ➡️ osf.io/tn8mh

submitted 3 days ago • 7 comments

interesting lignin pathways for @wikipathways (which they do cite) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2025.132786 #metabolomics

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Distilling atomistic foundation models! ⚗️🧪🤖 In this #compchem preprint, we describe a general (“architecture-agnostic”) approach to creating fast, application-specific MLIP models via synthetic data – led jointly by @jla-gardner.bsky.social & @dft-dutoit.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2506.10956

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Hello friends, my first first-author publication has just released! Please take a read, its open access! rdcu.be/eq1xQ

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing identical journal names, and likely similar business model. What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it? A 🧵 the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

submitted 5 days ago • 9 comments

LAUNCH DAY 🚀 Today I’m launching a new podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen (@jacobtref.bsky.social) Our first episode is about lenacapavir — a new HIV drug that blocks infections with an efficacy rate of nearly 100%, and which could completely change the fight against HIV worldwide.

submitted 9 days ago • 11 comments

As advised by the @aclu.org training, find the protest marshals, know where they are, & report to them if you see anything suspicious or if there are agitators. They're trained to know what to do. #NoKings #NoDictators #WeFightForDemocracy Learn more: www.aclu.org/know-your-ri...

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

submitted 6 days ago • 15 comments

yep! unpaywalled:

submitted 8 days ago • 85 comments

Study highlights need for mentorship and more inclusive networks for First Gen chemists - like me! www.chemistryworld.com/news/first-g...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Doing a PhD is really hard. Here’s how I’ve learnt to enjoy the process. https://go.nature.com/43GTyoI

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Chair of history department at U.S. Naval Academy resigns after order to remove paper from symposium “for reasons having nothing to do with scholarship.” [James Matheson, Baltimore Sun]

submitted 8 days ago • 31 comments

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Hey folks! I forgot to post this when we published this but I wanted to share! My org ( @omsf.io ) developed a set of playbooks to help people write better research software! I wrote this on developing software, I would love if you would take a look and share it! playbooks.omsf.io/developer/

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

The 2022 US Trans Survey has finally been released. It was a record survey of 92,329 trans people in the United States. It paints a picture of both tremendous project and extreme levels of discrimination and violence against trans people. ustranssurvey.org

submitted 9 days ago • 8 comments

The Fulbright Scholarship board resigned due to political interference from the Trump administration. The State Department, led by Marco Rubio, is canceling scholarships for nearly 200 American professors and researchers based on their research topics, which include climate change, gender, and race.

submitted 9 days ago • 16 comments

Great recs from @mattseybold.bsky.social on resisting technofeudal education: prioritize print, practice ungrading, "Luddify" the classroom; de-mobilize computer infrastructure (root technology in social place!); faculty governance over SaaS subscriptions; instructor choice re: ed-tech

submitted 10 days ago • 7 comments

As a result of public pressure generated by AAUP members’ collective action, UNC Chapel Hill's Board of Trustees voted to tenure the 33 faculty members who had been left in limbo by an unprecedented large-scale delay. Today, AAUP President Todd Wolfson called for an explanation. ⬇️

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

From Kaz Gary: For Pride Month, Astrobites is interviewing one transgender astronomer every week. This week we interviewed Dr. Eliot Halley Vrijmoet, a postdoctoral fellow at Smith College! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/06/06/e...

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Here we go... this year will likely be especially rough. If anyone (esp. in #CompChem, #BattChat, or #Catalysis) wants advice or a friendly app. reader, feel free to DM me. I've gone through the process twice, once in the US and once in Europe. Not an expert, but hopefully helpful. #ChemSky

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

I urge others to similarly support our patriots at NIH who use their training and talents to improve human health and position the US as the world’s leader in biomedical discovery, innovation and technology development 🙏

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

RFK Jr has fired everyone on CDC ACIP. He says "The public must know that unbiased science—evaluated through a transparent process & insulated from conflicts of interest—guides the recommendations of our health agencies." 👉 That's what we had and he just nuked it. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/h...

submitted 11 days ago • 5 comments

PhD students & postdocs can submit research and win a session at Lonza’s HTE lab Submit your research idea for a chance to win a fully supported HTE experiment session #chemsky www.lonza.com/visp/your-re...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

On Scholarly Communication My marking duties being over, it's time once more to take up the cudgels against the academic publishing racket, at least in a small way, by sharing an article from the European University Association called Reclaiming academic ownership of the scholarly communication…

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Funded #PhD with focus on #cheminformatics #DrugDesign at University of Hamburg (Germany) ref: 148 | start: 01-Sep-2025 | duration: 3 years | closing: 27-Jun-2025 #CompChem #ChemPhD #chemsky 🧪 www.uni-hamburg.de/en/stellenan...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

I know this is too general and context-free but if I never again see the words "low-hanging fruit" to describe research, it will be too soon. At this point, it might be safer to assume that all low-hanging fruits of science are already picked and whatever we collect with such ease is rotten.

submitted 12 days ago • 9 comments

"Web-scraping AI bots" the latest IT curse www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

This book on C Programming is available FREE. ⚛️ inria.hal.science/hal-02383654...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Today is the anniversary of Alan Turing’s suicide, in 1954. Turing was the father of modern computing. His codebreaking helped the Allies to win WWII. Arrested for being gay, he chose chemical castration over a prison sentence. He lost his security clearance, as all homosexuals were deemed a risk.

submitted 13 days ago • 13 comments

At this point, I would suggest as a general rule that the greater the embrace of this kind of approach to generative AI, the less invested the institution is in students actually learning something or having genuinely meaningful experiences. Students beware. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

submitted 13 days ago • 6 comments