1/ Glad to share this work, recently published in @JEvBio! Big congratulations to Chandrakanth (@DrosAlien) on his first first-author paper! academic.oup.com/jeb/advance…

Sometimes I believe that all aspects of our Govt have taken a vow to make our lives as difficult as possible, even when they don't have to, so that we remain dependent on them & have no expectations This allows them to earn our gratefulness when they do their barest minimum.

Experimental evolution of Drosophila without its microbiome biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #biorxiv_evobio

Excited to organize with Prof. V Mahadevan @official_ibab a symposium highlighting the women speakers investigating cancer as a complex system. Poster session, panel discussion, hands-on training on AI/ML in genomics too! Registration deadline: June 25. @biopatrika @rakeshthejoy

Excited to co-organize with @RamrayB the version 2.0 of 'Physics of Cells & Tissues' meeting, focused on cancer & development. sites.google.com/iisc.ac.in/… Grateful to @EMBO & Param Hansa Philanthropies @rakeshthejoy @kuamit @dheeraj for the support. @iiscbangalore @BE_IISc @Bio_IISc

Great to witness medical students @MAMC_NewDelhi @aiims_newdelhi engaging with mathematical modellers & AI/ML experts on potential collaborations, during the workshop. Exciting times ahead as @iiscbangalore & @IITKanpur set up hospitals on their campuses. @Sandeep_1966 @abandopa

sciencedirect.com/science/ar… The first paper from our lab on cancer dynamics is out in Journal of Theoretical Biology. This is work done by Vibishan BV (@requiemonloop) and Harshavardhan BV.

Overpublishing puts enormous stress on students and PIs. And brings tons of money to publishers in STEM. A new study shows that the number of papers is increasing FASTER than the number of #PhD graduates. It’s an amazing work with very useful statistics. Huge kudos to the authors! ▫️ Main outcomes: 1️⃣ In 2022 the number of articles is 47% higher than in 2016. The amount of writing, reviewing and editing workload per scientist is increased enormously. 2️⃣ “Special issues” is a strategy for publishing lots of papers with reduced review time. This is possible due to the “publish or perish” pressure and clearly benefits the publishers. 3️⃣ The publishing time varies widely! MDPI = 37 days. Frontiers = 72 days. Elsevier = 134 days. Springer = 157 days. Nature = 185 days. 4️⃣ The article rejection rates do not seem to correlate with publisher growth. However, rejection rates decline with increased use of special issue publishing. 5️⃣ Certain for-profit gold-open-access publishers create an increasing number of special issues, with uniquely reduced turnaround times, and in specific cases, high impact inflation and reduced rejection rates. 6️⃣ The authors suggest a new metric - Impact Inflation, which is reflected in self-citation within the same journal. For example, MDPI has a high impact inflation due to excessive self-citation compared to other publishers. Conclusions and my opinion: - Scientists have to spend a lot more time on reviewing and writing than before (on average). - The more papers are published, the more the quality is compromised. - Scientific progress has become partially bound to the business models of publishers and their revenue (a sad reality today). - There is a huge lack of transparency. Much of these data had to be ‘web-scraped’ from numerous sources in order to get a full picture. We clearly need regulators to mandate open access to publisher’s statistics. - Reduce the number of special issues! Those typically have low standards. ▫️ Science, publishing and funding make a trio that is very hard to disentangle. However, research quality is controlled by the community. This is why preprint + community review can make a big difference. #AcademicTwitter #AcademicChatter

9 out of 9 is an incredible result. India has dominated this qualifying stage with some of the best white-ball cricket I have seen India play. Now to the knock-outs, a different beast altogether

THREAD 🧵1. India is launching a controversial new carbon market. To trade in greenhouse gases. Why should citizens care about some companies making legit (or illegitimate) money from selling tonnes of a gas in a market? I and my @reporters_co colleague @nit_set explain 👇🏿

“Where are the rural queer voices?” Himachal Pradesh’s first pride march advocated for the rights of the queer community, drawing many from villages and small towns in the state. #PrideMarch #LGBTQIA ruralindiaonline.org/en/arti…