The shutdown of peer-review.io and the dynamics of volunteerism

Last week, Daniel Bingham announced that peer-review.io, the system he built for crowdsourcing peer review of academic manuscripts, will be shutting down (it seems to be already offline). It was an interesting experiment, and I’m disappointed, but I am also completely, utterly, 157% unsurprised. Here’s why.

Peer review is a form of academic service. For some folks it’s strictly a volunteer activity; for others it’s part of a paid job, but even then that connection is usually nebulous enough that taking on any particular review feels a lot like volunteerism.* Actually, a lot of academic service is like that: you may or may not be paid for it, but even if you are, the way that payment works is sufficiently nontransactional that it might as well be volunteer.** And that means academic service has dynamics that in my experience are pretty universal in the world of volunteerism. I think those dynamics explain pretty much entirely why peer-review.io couldn’t make a go of it.

Why “scholar” is such a great word

Sometimes the same interesting tidbit ends up in front of you twice in quick succession. The first time, it clears its throat politely and hopes you might notice it; but the second time, it sounds a klaxon and makes itself impossible to miss. It happened to me this week with the word “scholar”, and it made me realize just how wonderful a word it is.

If celebrity Latin names are a ploy for media attention, do they work?

Taylor Swift is in the news again.* So it’s a good time to point out, again, that there’s a millipede named after her (Nannaria swiftae), and a spider (Castianeira swiftay), and if there aren’t more species, there will be soon. “Celebrity Latin names” are a thing – among hundreds of examples there’s a horsefly named for Beyoncé, a fern named for Lady Gaga, a beetle named for Arnold Schwarzenegger, and of course the spider named for David Bowie that contributed to the title of my book. Namings like these are often assumed to be attempts to draw public attention, via the media.** If they are: do they work?

My most influential paper was a complete accident

Last week I wrote about how most of my papers aren’t that exciting – that they’re mostly “cinder-block” papers, and that that’s OK. In a career, most scientists will publish at most a small handful of “structural-column papers” – papers that represent big advances and that let others build on top of them in ways that take a field somewhere new. Among my own papers, I can point to just one that I’m sure is a structural-column paper* – and in last week’s post I admitted that that paper was influential by accident.

I said I should tell that story, and I will now.

Why most of my papers just aren’t that exciting

I’ve published about 95* papers in my career so far, and most of them aren’t very exciting.

I don’t mean that they’re boring to read, as written texts. Well, most of them are boring to read, to be honest (especially my earlier-career ones). In that, they’re just like almost all of our literature, tedious and turgid and bulging with cumbersome sentences festooned with jargon. I’m trying to do better, and to help others do better too, but for reasons I’ve dug into elsewhere it’s an uphill battle. But that’s not my point today.

What I mean is that most of my papers wouldn’t be very exciting even if they were masterfully and stylishly written. Most of them don’t make earthshaking contributions to my field; they don’t represent startling advances in how we understand the world around us. And that’s probably true of your papers too; and it’s completely OK.

On the kindness of Superman

If you were in Canada in the early 1990s, the Crash Test Dummies’ Superman’s Song was pretty much inescapable. Sometimes, a song that’s inescapable is absolutely awful*; but not Superman’s Song. It’s over 30 years later now, but I still think about it a lot.

The song is essentially a meditation on what we should actually admire about Superman (it’s set in the context of his funeral; and I know this sounds kind of dumb, but if you don’t know the song, give it a chance). Yes, he’s faster than a speeding bullet. Yes, he’s stronger than a locomotive. Yes, he can leap tall buildings with a single bound. As a kid, those were the things that impressed me about Superman.**

Aren’t AI declarations for journals kind of silly?

A couple of times in the last few months, as I’ve been battling my way through the manuscript submission process, I’ve had to declare whether or not I used AI assistance in writing the paper. And I can’t help thinking that the question I’m being asked there is just a really, really silly one.

I checked the box for “no”, but I honestly don’t know if that was correct or not:

Metamorphosis: on being (newly) retired

Warning: navel-gazing.

There’s something about emptying out a lab – one you’ve occupied for over two decades – that makes you think. Partly, of course, about things like “who the heck left this here” and “why on Earth did I keep this” – but also a bit more existentially. What am I going to do with myself now? What does retirement even look like?

You’d think I’d have a pretty good answer to that, given that I’ve been practicing for a while.

The joy, and frustration, of not knowing things

And all the science, I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week

-Bernie Taupin, lyrics for “Rocket Man”, Elton John

Odds are pretty good that, like me, you’ve heard Elton John’s “Rocket Man” about eighty-seven kajillion times. While it’s not generally good strategy to actually think about Bernie Taupin’s lyrics (most of which are not just inscrutable but nonsensical), that couplet about has always jumped out at me. For many, many years it bothered me – it’s backwards, I protested; my job five days a week is using science to understand things! But I’ve figured out that I was misinterpreting the lyric in two ways.

Open data and ChatGPT: on believing contradictory things

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

Through the Looking-glass, and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)

Scientists often pride themselves on not believing impossible things. You might even argue that deciding which things are impossible, and then not believing them, is the core of the scientific mission. So I’ve always been fascinated by the impossible things we do believe.