Suzi Gerber, PhD

Advice to the younger generation: Skip the degree. Buy land. Become a farmer.

Dear Publishers - We are getting increasingly frustrated. We often spend years on a single(!) study. It includes a lot of planning, expensive experiments, discussions, complex data analysis and writing the final masterpiece. Our students spend their most precious time on it. Our postdocs work to the limit because they know the cost of tenure-track positions. When we finalize the study, we write a thorough story and submit it. And we often celebrate because it’s done. We celebrate all the work we put into the study. But only to find out later that our manuscript is left sitting on someone’s desk for years. __ We don’t blame the editors, many of whom work tirelessly for very little compensation to assess submitted papers, find reviewers and make difficult decisions. Editors are often the same faculty & scientists as we are. We blame the system that favors business over science. The system in which we are expected to use our precious funding just to have that PDF uploaded online. Those $10,000 fees come from taxpayers’ money. Our students could attend 3 conferences instead. We could buy chemicals, instruments, computers... In other words, we could spend it on science and education. But instead we give $10,000 to a journal so that our PDF gets ‘approved’ and comes online, generating up to 40% profit margins for the publisher. __

The humanities would be better if peer reviewed operated more like this, I think.

Nina Teicholz on the keto diet: "You can reverse type two diabetes... reverse hypertension... reduce depression and anxiety by 79%... not within years, within weeks."