METACOGNITIONS

Studying the science of science | Science Magazine

Researchers Are Pushing Back Against Elsevier’s Open-Access Publishing Fees | The Atlantic

Imagine you’ve spent the last few years writing a manuscript. You submit it to a publisher, and they make you an offer: They’ll print it, but once it’s published, they own your work. They’ll sell it to people who want to read it, but you won’t see any of the profits. Alternatively, if you pay the publisher to print your work, they’ll release it to the public for free.  

Rachel Ignotofsky: Women in Science series

(The Last Word On Nothing | Why humans suck at earthquake preparedness)

When Fiona Ingleby took to Twitter last April to vent about a journal’s peer-review process, she didn’t expect much of a response. With only around 100 followers on the social-media network, Ingleby — an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK — guessed that she might receive a few messages of support or commiseration from close colleagues. What she got was an overwhelming wave of reaction.

In four pointed tweets, Ingleby detailed her frustration with a PLoS ONE reviewer who tried to explain away her findings on gender disparities in the transition from PhD to postdoc. He suggested that men had “marginally better health and stamina”, and that adding “one or two male biologists” as co-authors would improve the analysis. The response was a full-fledged ‘Twitterstorm’ that spawned more than 5,000 retweets, a popular hashtag — #addmaleauthorgate — and a public apology from the journal. “Things went really mental,” Ingleby says. “I had to turn off the Twitter notifications on my e-mail.” Yet her experience is not as unusual as it may seem.

Social media has enabled an increasingly public discussion about the persistent problem of sexism in science. When a male scientist with the European Space Agency (ESA) wore a shirt patterned with half-naked women to a major media event in November 2014, Twitter blazed with criticism. The site was where the first reports surfaced in June of Nobel Prizewinning biologist Tim Hunt’s self-confessed “trouble with girls” in laboratories. And in mid-October, many astronomers took to Twitter to register their anger and disappointment when the news broke that Geoffrey Marcy, an exoplanet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, was found to have sexually harassed female subordinates for at least a decade.

“I have been in [the] field for 15 years,” wrote Sarah Hörst, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “It is my field now too & we are not going to do things this way anymore if I have anything to do w/ it.”

These Animals Use Personal Names, But Never Gossip | Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

re: OP’s question: just found this AWESOME STUDY where adults speak to other adults, a parrot (!), an infant, and a dog. apparently people hyperarticulate vowels the most when talking to infants, which makes sense given that IDS/parentese is supposed to be a way for kids to receive more accessible input re: native language sounds. welp i will be nerding out about this for the rest of the morning, thanks OP!

How to scare off a marauding elephant

How do you scare off a hungry elephant? With a hungry tiger, of course. In the farming towns of southern India, elephants are agricultural pests, thanks to their nighttime raids on crop fields. Farmers typically try to prevent elephant raids with electric fences and trenches. But such tactics aren’t foolproof, and when they fail, humans or elephants can be killed. In a new study, researchers determined that audio recordings of threatening sounds—human shouts and leopard and tiger growls—can keep the ravenous beasts at bay.