How audit rules and public infrastructure could break science’s publishing monopolies. An English version of my post for the Verfassungsblog from December 19, 2025. Scientific journals that feel straight out of 1665, prices that could come from a MrBeast meet-and-greet, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science
165 results.
Due to political developments, the US have become a much less welcoming and hence dramatically less attractive place for academic conferences. This year, nobody from our research group was interested in attending our otherwise regular meeting of the Society for […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on November 13, 2025
at 09:34
Comments Off on Motor learning mechanisms at #SfN25
I have been involved in the open science movement for nearly 20 years now. By now, it seems to me the problems have been clearly recognized and formulated, the experts agree on the necessary technical solutions (replacing the journals) and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on July 30, 2025
at 09:38
Comments Off on Edgewise
Ever since Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, physics has been grappling with the unsettling realization that the universe does not function like clockwork—a metaphor Newton introduced and which held sway for centuries. In a world where predictability and uncertainty […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on July 10, 2025
at 15:54
Comments Off on Embrace the uncertainty
Universities worldwide currently face a pivotal choice: should they contribute to building a global infrastructure for exchange, science, and discourse, free from the control of oligarchs, to promote democracy, human rights, and digital participation? Or should they continue advertising on […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on December 22, 2024
at 16:35
Comments Off on By their actions you shall know them
For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their content, rather than counting the applicants’ previous […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on November 6, 2024
at 17:56
Comments Off on Research assessment: new panels, new luck?
It has been almost 10 years now that we have come to the realization that a particular type of our operant experiments can be classified as motor learning. In such “operant self-learning” experiments, the animal learns about the consequences of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on October 1, 2024
at 17:28
Comments Off on Motor learning at #SfN24
In a discussion about what decisions are, John Krakauer emphatically pronounced that “decisions happen for reasons”, in answering ‘no’ to my question if it wasn’t a decision with which foot to start walking from a stand-still. A recent article from […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on September 6, 2024
at 13:47
Comments Off on What is a decision?
I was very excited when our latest research paper came out, after all, I was confident our 30-year-long search for the sites of plasticity in the form of motor learning we study was coming to an end. In this work, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on July 26, 2024
at 12:27
Comments Off on Whodathunk? Motor learning in motor neurons, huh?
A few years ago, I came across a cartoon that seemed to capture a particular aspect of scholarly journal publishing quite well: The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat. There are […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
