UPDATE , 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user on Twitter, I now know that it is possible to open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends occupy one virtual desktop and the text another. In this way, I can actually review on-screen, but it is one heck of a work-around and by no means convenient. I cannot take it any more.

This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a mistake. UPDATE , 09/01/2015: A commenter made me aware of data rows in the raw data we had overlooked before.

Skinner used the term “schedules of reinforcement” to describe broad categories of reward patterns which come to reliably control the behavior of his experimental animals. For instance, when he rewarded rats for pressing a lever at a given interval after the last reinforcement (i.e., fixed interval; FI), the animals would pause pressing the lever until just before the interval was over and then start pressing the lever like mad.

I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some of the survey results here. The working group polled all faculty members of the university on various questions concerning scholarly publishing.

Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science . After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, where a scientist is published all too often is more important than what they have published.

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis et al. entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy and SciELO costs amount to US$3160 per article.

Today, our most recent paper got published, before traditional peer-review, at F1000 Research . The research is about how nominally identical fly stocks can behave completely differently even if tested by the same person in the same lab in the same test.

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly Drosophila (more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.