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Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

One-year taught MSc in Global Plant Health with five-month research project. David Sainsbury 50% Fee Scholarships available for home students. Apply now for 21 September entry. Deadline 28/8/26 for home students. www.tsl.ac.uk/msc

For liverwort mavens, I've needed to shift our Marchantia resources to a new website (I've reached retirement from academia in Cambridge) - and the plant synthetic biology stuff has moved to https://www.haseloff-lab.info (Now have more time for DIY builds! Updates to come)

This is a landmark for C4 rice - huge effort by the whole team

13h

Whichever of the purple dots you look at turns more purple.

Daniel Gorelick

This work nicely quantifies a major issue in our universities: "In higher education, administrative costs have risen much faster than instruction and research costs (4). MIT Faculty grew by only 9.2% between 1985 and 2023, while administrative staff grew by 189%." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

The new OrthoFinder paper is out now! In this new work, we introduce major advances in accuracy and scalability, allowing analysis on much larger datasets www.nature.com/articles/s41... github.com/OrthoFinder/...

Check out this report on what happens when a journal pays reviewers for their work. Fast turnaround times and streamlined experience for authors. @biologyopen.bsky.social published by @biologists.bsky.social has now gone beyond the trial and show the results from a year of implementing Fast & Fair.