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AI in academia…how big a ‘problem’?* *This text was not written with AI.

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Been silent for a while. Every day stuff, meetings, meditation(?)…you all know what I mean.   However, what got me thinking lately, is the advent of LLM and its impacts on academia. I’ve heard a lot and read some more, about its grey aspects: students writing essays with it, fellowship candidates preparing applications with Chat gpt, or even full papers being drafted by AI. The challenges are clear for teachers, journal editors and PIs who have (too strongly?) relied on the writing skills of students and researchers as a means to show their capacity to do good science. But is AI bad for science?   Less often we hear the positive aspects that, such an amazing technological development, can offer to academia. For starters, its speeds access to code which may be needed for statistical analysis, model building, larger coding or drawing neat figures. Nevertheless, it is for the writing that I think there is much to gain. One aspect that is without question, is how it improves speed in the p
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The essence of scientific research

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“I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” — Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (yet another of my Indy Jones’s quotes)   In recent times (and in some countries more than in others), there is an increasing debate about what scientists do. The various challenges humankind faces, from global change, to sustainable food production or antimicrobial resistance, heed urgent solutions for which, a vast part of modern society agrees on, should be based on science.   The urgency for scientist to get down to work and solve our ‘big’ issues, resonates with (some) research agencies and employers. It is not new to many of us, that via oriented research grant windows, we are drawn towards studying new issues or systems which match our interests with those of the funders. Needless to say, here, research needs funding (I say this because it seems to me that not all employers in the Global South are fully aware of this connection). However nowadays, we see a stronger pressure to purs
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Open data: an open debate?

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The way science is communicated is changing fast, super-fast.    Only a few years ago, scientists would access research within their field of interest, by reading published papers, accessed through subscriptions to journals. Recall that then, all was printed in paper (and black and white) and bounded in issues and volumes which were mailed (snail-mailed) to paying subscribers. In the larger universities and wealthier countries, libraries hosted most major journals and had agreements in place with other libraries to access works they did not harbor themselves. To access a paper, you just needed to walk into the library or ask the librarian for help.    In the Global South (gee… I hate this term!) there were already in place, some basic loopholes. We knew some colleague or research groups (abroad for instance, but not exclusively) to whom we would write and would kindly ask to photocopy (and fax?) that critical paper they had and that we had found by spending hours going through Current
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Publication from the Global South in the current world

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  For us ecologists, publication of our findings is a key aspect of doing science. We conceptualize questions, plan and execute experiments and then we need to report them to our peers. However, nowadays, the landscape of publication is seeing rapid change. Open science is out there; an important transformation to democratize science. Pre-print servers based on a ‘crowdsourcing’ model are an interesting and growing development that, however, also brings up much debate 1 . And then, we have recently a number of papers shouting out the problems with inequities in access to scholarly publication by researchers working in less developed world economies, or more often termed, the Global South  2,3  (I admit I’m not a big fan of this term, as I disagree with the geographical implication as well the grouping of wealthy vs poor nations, especially so in the sciences). This brings-up a much called for problem. Are we scientists from the Global South hindered to publish and have an impact on eco
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On making population ecology attractive to undergraduate students

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This semester I teach again at the Universidad Nacional del Comahue. This year, it is the turn of Population Ecology. I normally deliver this course every other year, alternating it with one on Behavioral Ecology.   I find the contrast between both courses quite interesting. Most topics I teach in animal behaviour have a clearer theoretical background (e.g., optimal foraging theory, the marginal value theorem, local mate competition or clutch size) and there are good textbooks that allow organizing students’ work. In addition, biology students are typically fascinated by what animals are capable of doing and on how evolution has modeled behaviour.   In population ecology things are less clear. For starters, there few if any updated proper textbooks. There are of course a number of books on the subject matter, but the focus is set on either the methods (best ways to estimate animal abundance, software tools, etc.), looking into specific aspects (such as population genetics), or else are
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On how open access improves accessibility to ecological science: does it?

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Recently, I attended (if virtually) the Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society (BES), termed this year,“Festival of Ecology”. A really nice meeting, amazingly well organized and with an attractive program. Among a variety of activities which I was interested in, there was the obvious one: a visit to the BES stand where societal publications are traditionally exhibited. Because of my interest in applied ecology, I was rapidly attracted to a new journal aimed at improving the linkage between science and solution of the increasing environmental issues related to anthropogenic activities. This is the 7th BES journal which states that the way in that scientific data and information may reach practitioners is, among several changes,  by including new article types (such as “Data Articles”) in a flexible format1. An additional aspect in this sense, is avoiding the paywall by making the journal fully open access. This latter issue got me thinking. In fact I have  been ruminating on O
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Global warming. So much progress, huh? (a message for the younger scientists)

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Last weekend, while tiding an old trunk full of notes and papers and other stuff that sits in our lounge under a zillion plant pots, I came across this Newsweek cover I show above.  The leading title: “No more hot air. Its’ time to talk sense about the Environment” caught my eye immediately. The issue is dated June 1992, that is 28 years ago and referred to a United Nations Earth Summit (actually the first one) that was held in Rio de Janeiro that year. Among a list of issues that were on the table then, I noted and agenda (named Agenda 21) through which industrial nations would help poor countries develop their economies without damaging their environments. The IPCC was created in 1988 (and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2007) and the Kyoto protocol was signed by many countries in 1997. Yet, I often wonder how much has been achieved since then or if we have done enough. We see glaciers melting, droughts and floods more often than expected or in new areas, and several biological groups t
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