There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned defunding of the endowments of arts and humanities or the initiatives to completely abolish the EPA and other science agencies.

For the last few years, we have been working on the development of new Drosophila flight simulators. Now, finally, we are reaching a stage where we are starting to think about how to store the data we’ll be capturing both with Open Science in mind, but particularly keeping in mind that this will likely be the final major overhaul of this kind of data until I retire in 20 years.

Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform), as long as these events do not entail a clear goal for action. I have several reasons for this decision, most of them boil down to a cost/benefit estimate. The time spent traveling does not seem worth the hardly noticeable benefits any more. I got involved in Open Science more than 10 years ago.

Few insect behaviors are more iconic than the proverbial moths circling the lamps at night. Artist: Dave McKean These observations are prime examples of the supposedly stereotypic insect responses to external stimuli. In contrast, in our new paper that just appeared today, we describe experiments suggesting that insects appear to make a value-based decision before approaching the light.

With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher.

Public institutions the world over are required to spend their funds responsibly. Commonly, this is done by requiring them to host bids for purchases or services above a certain threshold. If you work at a public institution and have wondered, e.g., why you are only allowed to buy a computer from your computing facility which only sells one particular brand, then the answer likely is that this brand won the bidding contest.

This is our first poster at this year’s SfN meeting in San Diego. It’s about decision-making in fruit flies. We find a probabilistic form of decision-making that suggests that without understanding the mechanisms behind this fundamental uncertainty, we will never fully understand decision-making. Clicking on the image will let you download the PDF Version of the poster.

A recurrent topic among faculty and librarians interested in infrastructure reform is the question of whose turn it is to make the next move. Researchers rightfully argue that they cannot submit their work exclusively to modern, open access journals because that would risk their and their employees’ jobs. Librarians, equally correctly, argue that they would cancel subscriptions if faculty wouldn’t complain about ensuing access issues.

At various meetings I get often asked by early career researchers, librarians or other colleagues what my interactions with publishers felt like. I usually answer that my last twelve years campaigning for infrastructure reform felt like academia was receiving the big middle finger from publishers: No matter what you try, academia, we’ll still get your money, stupid suckers!

At seemingly every possibility in a discussion on peer-review, people apparently feel the need to emphasize that in the current model reviewers (or most academic editors handling peer-review) are not being paid.