Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Girish Kale

@vgzt2021.bsky.social

Tomorrow is VGZT day! 🚀

Don’t miss the great talks from
👉 Allison Kann (@apkann.bsky.social)
👉 Joana da Silva (on X: @joanamsilva14)

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks @vgzt2021.bsky.social · 13d

Join us for next week’s exciting VGZT session! 🎉

🗓️ Thursday, November 20th
⏰ 9:30 PST / 12:30 EST / 17:30 UTC / 17:30 GMT / 18:30 CET

Our speakers are
👉 Allison Kann (@apkann.bsky.social)
👉 Joana da Silva (on X: @joanamsilva14)

See you there 👋

November 19, 2025 at 8:21 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks

@vgzt2021.bsky.social

Join us for next week’s exciting VGZT session! 🎉

🗓️ Thursday, November 20th
⏰ 9:30 PST / 12:30 EST / 17:30 UTC / 17:30 GMT / 18:30 CET

Our speakers are
👉 Allison Kann (@apkann.bsky.social)
👉 Joana da Silva (on X: @joanamsilva14)

See you there 👋

November 14, 2025 at 8:43 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Allegra Angeloni

@angeloniallegra.bsky.social

1/ I’m very excited to share my postdoc work with @kseskv.bsky.social, in collaboration with @oligriffith.bsky.social. We explore embryonic DNA methylation reprogramming in the fat-tailed dunnart, an Australian marsupial 🦘🌏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

www.biorxiv.org

November 12, 2025 at 2:57 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

the Node

@the-node.bsky.social

Our next #DevPres webinar focusses on regeneration with talks from Stephanie Tsai and Ben Cox @beeeencox.bsky.social.

📆Wed 19 November
🕓16:00 GMT/UTC

For more info and to register: thenode.biologists.com/development-...

November 12, 2025 at 10:15 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks

@vgzt2021.bsky.social

We are excited to announce the first Eastern ☀️VGZT session for this season!✨🎉

📅Tomorrow, November 12th
⏰ 9:00 UTC / 9:00 GMT / 10:00 CET / 14:30 IST / 18:00 JST / 20:00 AEDT

Our speakers are:
👉Sameer Thukral (on X: @SameerThukral6)
👉Axel Newton (on X: @AxelHNewton)

See you on tomorrow☕️👋

November 11, 2025 at 12:47 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Mark A. Hanson

@hansonmark.bsky.social

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM

Girish Kale

@girishkalephd.bsky.social

Thanks @amjeve.bsky.social for the invitation to write this perspective in the 'In Preprints' series in @dev-journal.bsky.social .

What's the downside of acclimation to low temperature? Turns out you will perform worse in heat shock.
doi.org/10.1242/dev....

In preprints: multiomics of low temperature acclimation in the era of intensifying temperature fluctuations

In a warming world, all life forms – endotherms and ectotherms alike – are finding their homeostasis being challenged. The environmental change is challenging at all stages of life. How different orga...

doi.org

October 20, 2025 at 5:24 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks

@vgzt2021.bsky.social

We are excited to announce the second Western VGZT of Season 7!

🗓️Thursday, October 16th
⏰9:30 PDT / 12:30 EDT / 16:30 UTC / 17:30 BST / 18:30 CET

Our speakers:
👉 Hidenobu Miyazawa (on X: @HidenobuAnzo)
👉 Girish Kale (@girishkalephd.bsky.social)

See you next week! 👋

October 10, 2025 at 9:51 AM

Girish Kale

@girishkalephd.bsky.social

Join the VGZT session next Thursday, with a seminar also from yours truly :)

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks @vgzt2021.bsky.social · Oct 10

We are excited to announce the second Western VGZT of Season 7!

🗓️Thursday, October 16th
⏰9:30 PDT / 12:30 EDT / 16:30 UTC / 17:30 BST / 18:30 CET

Our speakers:
👉 Hidenobu Miyazawa (on X: @HidenobuAnzo)
👉 Girish Kale (@girishkalephd.bsky.social)

See you next week! 👋

October 10, 2025 at 10:29 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

James Briscoe

@jamesbriscoe.bsky.social

The @crick.ac.uk is recruiting Early Career Group Leaders

- Lab set-up, research costs, salaries for up to 5 researchers
- Support for up to 12 years
- Access to our core facilities
- Competitive salary
- Fantastic colleagues
- All areas of biology

Deadline 27 Nov

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Early career group leaders

We appoint researchers from across biology and biomedicine to set up their first groups at the Crick.

www.crick.ac.uk

October 10, 2025 at 8:20 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Jean-Yves Tinevez

@jytinevez.bsky.social

Job alert!

We are looking for a bioimage analysis to work in an image analysis core facility in beautiful Paris. Can I ask you to share this opportunity with your networks?

See also on the forum:
forum.image.sc/t/research-e...

Research engineer in Bioimage Analysis for the researchers of the inIdEx FORMULA

Hi all We are looking for a bioimage analysis to work in an image analysis core facility in beautiful Paris. Can I ask you to share this opportunity with your networks? The position is in the Instit...

forum.image.sc

October 7, 2025 at 12:39 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks

@vgzt2021.bsky.social

Dear VGZT enthusiasts,
Do you—or someone in your lab—work on exciting developmental biology research? Showcase it at VGZT, a global online seminar series connecting developmental biologists across all career stages. Apply here: www.tinyurl.com/VGZT-Nomination

VGZT Season 7 - Nomination

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks (VGZT) is an opportunity to share your science with an engaged, international audience of developmental biologists. Running from October 2025 to July 2026, this online ...

www.tinyurl.com

October 6, 2025 at 8:12 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

FlyBase

@flybase.bsky.social

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...
We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us.
#FlyBase #Drosophila

FlyBase Update – October 2025
The termination of the NIH/NHGRI FlyBase grant has placed the long-term sustainability of FlyBase at risk. However, thanks to the generous support of several key individuals and institutions, we are pleased to announce that FlyBase will remain operational through the coming year. We extend our deepest gratitude to Yukiko Yamashita, Cassandra Extavour, Hugo Bellen, Thom Kaufman, the Genetics Society of America / Drosophila Board, the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, an anonymous donor and the Wellcome Trust. We are especially thankful for a generous gift from Seemay Chou, Jed McCaleb, and The Navigation Fund. We also greatly appreciate the continued support from the broader Drosophila community – your donations and service fees have been vital in helping us stay afloat. Special thanks also go to Jessica Manning for her tireless administrative work at Harvard, to Ruth Lehmann, Hugo Bellen, and Paul Sternberg for advice and efforts, and to the Board of the European Drosophila Society for all their efforts. Sadly, we must also share that several long-standing FlyBase team members have recently moved on. We are immensely grateful to Susan Russo-Gelbart, Lynn Crosby, Gil dos Santos, Kris Broll, Victoria Jenkins, and TyAnna Lovato for their many years of dedicated service and contributions to FlyBase. Looking ahead, ensuring FlyBase’s sustainability beyond the next year – and successfully integrating with the Alliance – will require new funding sources. We kindly ask for your continued support:
• European labs: Please consider contributing to the Cambridge, U.K. FlyBase group
• U.S. and other non-European labs: Please consider contributing to the U.S. FlyBase groups
• Both U.K. and U.S. FlyBase are working diligently to establish an invoicing system. We appreciate your continued patience.
For more information on how to support us, please visit: Contribute to FlyBase wiki page https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

October 3, 2025 at 6:19 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Virtual Gastrulation Zoom Talks

@vgzt2021.bsky.social

We are excited to announce the first Western VGZT of Season 7! 🎉

🗓️ Thursday, October 2nd
⏰ 9:30 PDT / 12:30 EDT / 16:30 UTC / 17:30 BST / 18:30 CET

Our speakers:

👉 Antonia Weberling (@a-weberling.bsky.social)

👉 Sanjay Narayanaswamy (@sanjay-n.bsky.social)

September 25, 2025 at 2:17 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

paveltomancak.bsky.social

@paveltomancak.bsky.social

We are all super happy and proud to see our work on the function and evolution of the #cephalic #furrow published in @nature.com. Let me say a few things about the background and history of this work on the #Evolution_of_Morphogenesis (1/12)

September 4, 2025 at 8:22 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Yu-Chiun Wang

@yuchiunwang.bsky.social

Tissue 'tectonic' collision is detrimental, but flies found two distinct solutions! Gratifying and grateful to be included in this collective effort, w/ Steffen Lemke, to crack the (or 'a') code of #cephalicfurrow, now out in @nature.com, all with @paveltomancak.bsky.social at the helm. (1/9)

September 4, 2025 at 5:18 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

preLights

@prelights.bsky.social

🚨 New call for preLighters!🚨

Help us highlight the most exciting biological #preprints. Share your insights, build your profile, and be part of a supportive community! 🌍

Interested? Apply today & help shape the future of science publishing! 📢

More info: prelights.biologists.com/news/join-th...

September 1, 2025 at 8:59 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Mark Peifer (He, him)

@peiferlabunc.bsky.social

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share

Dear Fly Community,

In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled.

The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC).

Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options.

To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum).

To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

Our immediate goals are:

1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online

2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance).

Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data.

At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise.

Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028.

We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide.

Sincerely,
The FlyBase Team

August 23, 2025 at 12:18 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

The Company of Biologists

@biologists.bsky.social

July in preprints, the CellBio edition, is out now on the preLights website.

Thanks to Girish Kale, Matthew Davies, Barbora Knotkova and Sristilekha Nath for their contributions.

Have a look:

prelights.biologists.com/prelists/jul...

#PrePrints #Publishing #Biology #Research #CellBio #PreLights

July in preprints - the CellBio edition - preLights

Related posts

prelights.biologists.com

August 20, 2025 at 1:07 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

FlyBase

@flybase.bsky.social

FlyBase needs your help! We ask that European labs continue to contribute to Cambridge, UK FlyBase, whereas US and other non-European labs can contribute to US FlyBase. For more information and how to donate: wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...

FlyBase:Contribute to FlyBase - FlyBase Wiki

wiki.flybase.org

August 15, 2025 at 12:45 PM

Girish Kale

@girishkalephd.bsky.social

Please support FlyBase however you can. The importance of @flybase.bsky.social to biology research mirrors what flies to our ecosystems. You can throw money (if you have it) at only one of these problems to go away, but I guess that's a start.

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Aug 14

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate.

www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

August 14, 2025 at 9:14 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

preLights

@prelights.bsky.social

‪July in #Preprints – the CellBio edition - is out.

Thanks to @girishkalephd.bsky.social, Matthew Davies, Barbora Knotkova, and Sristilekha Nath for their contributions.

Have a look! 🍵

July in preprints - the CellBio edition - preLights

prelights.biologists.com

August 7, 2025 at 10:27 AM

Reposted by Girish Kale

the Node

@the-node.bsky.social

Would you like to be the Node’s new Community Manager?

If you're interested in #SciComm and passionate about #DevBio, apply to join the @dev-journal.bsky.social & @biologists.bsky.social team.

Find out more about what the role entails: bit.ly/4otQ2GL

#JobOpportunity

Community Manager, the Node - the Node

The Company of Biologists and its journal Development are seeking to appoint a new Community Manager to run its successful community website ‘the Node’ and the journal’s social media activities. Launc...

thenode.biologists.com

August 5, 2025 at 2:34 PM

Reposted by Girish Kale

Katie Millar

@katiemillar.bsky.social

I can't believe this only ended up getting 3,590 supporters when it needed 10,000; it was a sad day. This has unlocked a new fixation, and I will campaign to get this reopened... #Drosophila #Tribolium #CoolScience #FruitFlies

beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...