Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
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d-macphee.bsky.social
Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
@d-macphee.bsky.social
1.4K followers 430 following 1.2K posts
Reproductive Scientist. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Opinions my own. Also on Mastodon: @dmacphee@mas.to
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d-macphee.bsky.social
Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦 @d-macphee.bsky.social · Jul 10
Our latest in AJOG Global Reports from a great collaboration.

Prospective determination of heat shock protein serum levels in Saskatchewan women during pregnancy (open access)
#ReproSky #ObGynSky #ObSky #Pregnancy #Labour #Biomarkers 🧪 #Canada #Saskatchewan

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Prospective determination of heat shock protein serum levels in Saskatchewan women during pregnancy
The stress proteins, heat shock protein 27, heat shock protein 70, and αB-crystallin, have all been detected in human serum under normal and disease c…
www.sciencedirect.com
d-macphee.bsky.social
Not really surprising. No matter how hard one tries to avoid it, science gets used for political purposes.
#Science
www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...
The Epidemiologists Are Running for Office
Instead of trying to depoliticize their field, a swell of scientists want to become politicians.
www.theatlantic.com
November 11, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
slavov-n.bsky.social
A reminder that the abundance of 'housekeeping' proteins varies significantly across cells and tissues.

GAPDH is often slandered as a 'housekeeping' protein, and its abundance varies significantly across human tissues.

How do you define a 'housekeeping' protein ?
November 11, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
hansonmark.bsky.social
Fundamentally, what we need is leadership. But we break with the chorus of most #OpenScience initiatives here and emphasize very strongly that this leadership must come from funders and institutions.

We researchers can support the battle, but we cannot lead the charge. Funders hold the cards.

6/n
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
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
hansonmark.bsky.social
More fundamentally, every active scientist has been brought up in a system where The Drain was already normalized.

This system hasn't always existed. For-profit publishers are a recent invention. Their value proposition has always been awful, and now they are actively eroding trust in science.

5/n
2. Stopping the drain Back in the 1950s, when for-profit journal publishing was just getting going, British scientific leaders predicted that ‘the moment commercial gain began to dominate this field, the welfare of the scientific community would suffer’ (1). They were right – and it is past time that we acted. The first step we must take is to recognize the seriousness of the problems that scientific publishing’s engagement with for-profit publishing have become.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
hansonmark.bsky.social
For-profit journals are supposed to improve research quality, yet they're perversely incentivized to churn out whatever they can monetize. This was happening before AI (see Strain: bit.ly/43gJPUM), and AI will make it worse.

It's insane that we volunteer our time to help them do so.

4/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
hansonmark.bsky.social
Scientists operate on principles of good faith. But this is just ridiculous. If you, dear reader, take nothing else away from The Drain paper, it is that publishers cannot be invited to the table any longer.

They can participate and carve a space, but they can't be part of shaping policy.

3/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
hansonmark.bsky.social
The solutions of the past 3 decades have failed to change the incentives of #PublishOrPerish. As a result, researcher funding, time, control, and trust has been lost.

The ONE CONSTANT in the wake of the serial crisis, #PlanS and #OpenAccess reform has been publish profit margins.

2/n
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.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
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
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
docmcohen.medsky.social
The impact that an anti-vax, anti-science provincial government can have on the entire country.
Alberta's role in Canada's loss of measles elimination status embarrassing, former chief medical officer says | CBC News
The latest federal data shows Alberta accounts for 38 per cent of Canada’s cases.
www.cbc.ca
November 11, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
socdevbio.bsky.social
Hydra (Hydra vulgaris) ✨Small but mighty! Hydra can regenerate its entire body, even its head 🧠 A classic model for regeneration, stem cell dynamics, and body axis patterning 📸 Image by Daniel Bressan de Andrade #ModelMonday #DevBio #Regeneration
November 11, 2025 at 2:28 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
cdnhistoryehx.bsky.social
On this day in 1918, the First World War came to an end. Across Canada, people celebrated in the streets. Over 600,000 Canadians enlisted, with 60,000 killed and 172,000 wounded.

Learn more in my Deep Dive 👇
canadaehx.com/2022/11/08/c...
A black-and-white photograph of a group of people riding a horse-drawn wagon labeled "The Canadian Transfer Co. Limited." The individuals, dressed in early 20th-century attire including hats and coats, are holding large paper megaphones and appear to be celebrating or protesting, with some waving and others holding flags. The scene takes place on a city street with buildings and signs in the background, including one for "Chiclets."
November 11, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
angierasmussen.bsky.social
Yesterday Canada lost its measles elimination status after a year of continuous transmission. Like measles itself, this was preventable. We need to step up our efforts to make vaccination available to all. I talked to CBC about it live from @astmh.bsky.social:

www.cbc.ca/player/play/...
The National | Canada loses measles elimination status
Nov. 10, 2025 | Canada loses its measles elimination status after more than 12 months of sustained transmission. U.S. President Donald Trump pardons Rudy Giuliani and other loyal allies. Plus, the rac...
www.cbc.ca
November 11, 2025 at 12:13 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
cdnhistoryehx.bsky.social
On this day in 1813, the Battle of Crysler's Farm was fought near present-day Morrisburg, Ontario. In the battle, 800 Canadian and British troops faced 8,000 Americans. The battle was a defeat for the Americans, who then abandoned their Saint Lawrence campaign.
A historical painting depicting a large-scale battle scene with numerous soldiers engaged in combat on an open field. The scene includes infantry formations, cavalry, and artillery, with smoke rising from the battlefield. Flags are visible, including one with a British design, and the background features a cloudy sky, scattered trees, and a few distant buildings.
November 11, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
ariannaciccone.bsky.social
BBC resignations are a symbol of mounting pressure on public broadcasters in the Trump era.

In the current political environment, public broadcasters are high-priority targets for right-wing media and politicians.
BBC resignations are a symbol of mounting pressure on public broadcasters in the Trump era
In the current political environment, public broadcasters are high-priority targets for right-wing media and politicians.
www.niemanlab.org
November 10, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
maxjtelford.bsky.social
My book 'The Tree of Life' is published in the USA and Canada today.

Available as book, on kindle and as audio.

I would be really grateful for reposts.

www.amazon.com/Tree-Life-So...
www.amazon.ca/Tree-Life-So...
Cover of book titled The Tree of Life: solving science's greatest puzzle.
November 11, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
cdnhistoryehx.bsky.social
Happy birthday to Adam Beach, born on this day in 1972 in Ashern, Manitoba.
In his acting career, he has appeared in many productions including Smoke Signals, Law and Order: SVU, Arctic Air, North of 60, The Power of the Dog and Flags of Our Fathers. He is a Golden Globe nominee.
A man with dark hair and a serious expression, wearing a black leather jacket over a dark shirt, stands in a dimly lit corridor with a blurred background featuring soft lights and a modern architectural design.
November 11, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
minibubbly.bsky.social
#Canada opening new consulate in #Greenland this week, in a bid for closer relations

Diplomatic move comes as both allies face annexation threats from U.S.

/1 thread

www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
In a bid for closer ties, Canada is opening a new consulate in Greenland's capital this week | CBC News
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand will travel to Greenland's capital, Nuuk, this week to open a new Canadian consulate as both allies seek to strengthen ties amid turbulent relations with the Unite...
www.cbc.ca
November 11, 2025 at 10:03 AM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
dougsaunders.bsky.social
It’s appalling the British Prime Minister
has not actively stood up for the BBC amid what is transparently not anything like a bias problem but a deeply petty nitpick of its periphery functions by partisan folk appointed by previous governments that hate the broadcaster
November 10, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
theomoudakis.bsky.social
My cartoon in today's Toronto Star
November 11, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
cdnhistoryehx.bsky.social
On this day in 1983, Corey Hart released his debut studio album First Offense.
The album contained the hit songs Sunglasses at Night and It Ain't Enough. The album won a Juno and a Grammy. It sold over 500,000 copies and reached #31 in the United States.
A promotional image of Corey Hart, featuring the artist with dark, voluminous hair and a serious expression, wearing a white open-collared shirt. The background is a blurred mix of blue and neutral tones, with the text "COREY HART" on the left side and "FIRST OFFENSE" on the right, indicating the title of his debut album released in 1983.
November 11, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
lewisgoodall.com
The reaction to the Panorama edit has been nothing short of hysterical. Yes the BBC has some impartiality problems. But its biggest isn't the one you think.

New piece from me.

open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...
The truth about impartiality at the BBC
And the hysteria of the current "crisis"
open.substack.com
November 10, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
motherjones.com
The president can't pardon cronies facing state charges. He's trying anyway.
Trump issues fake pardons for fake electors
The president can't pardon cronies facing state charges. He's trying anyway.
www.motherjones.com
November 10, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
moriartylab.bsky.social
Canadian COVID Forecast: Nov 8 - Nov 21, 2025

SEVERE: AB
VERY HIGH: CAN, MB, NB, NL, North, NS, QC, SK
HIGH: BC, ON, PEI
MODERATE: none

About 1 in 118 people in Canada are CURRENTLY infected.
This image shows gauges with the Nov 8 - Nov 21, 2025 Forecast scores for Canada, the provinces, & territories. From left to right: Canada: VERY HIGH - 10.1 Alberta: SEVERE - 16.2 British Columbia: HIGH - 8.4 Manitoba: VERY HIGH - 11.9 New Brunswick: VERY HIGH - 14.5 Newfoundland & Labrador: VERY HIGH - 10.1 North: VERY HIGH - 11.5 Nova Scotia: VERY HIGH - 12.7 Ontario: HIGH - 9.2 Prince Edward Island: HIGH - 7.7 Quebec: VERY HIGH - 10.1 Saskatchewan: VERY HIGH - 13.1 A text box reads: "The COVID Forecast is calculated from 3 equally weighted categories: 1) Current infections and spread; 2) Healthcare system impact; 3) Mortality. Within each category there is one sub-category for trends over the most recent week (Trends) and one sub-category for current parameter values relative to a specified baseline (Current values). Trends and current values are weighted equally when determining the final score for a category. All Forecast input data and sources are available here (https://datastudio.google.com/embed/u/0/reporting/42b886cf-d661-488e-b7d8-5c5836b55ab6/page/p_2yqs028mwc). Past Forecast scores are available in the table below. Forecast scores are grouped into 4 ranges: MODERATE (1 to <5, white), HIGH (6 to <10, yellow), VERY HIGH (10 to <15, orange), SEVERE (>15 red)."
November 10, 2025 at 10:56 PM
d-macphee.bsky.social
Yes!! Use the ODF format and preserve your access!!
#FOSS #LibreOffice
libreoffice.bsky.social LibreOffice @libreoffice.bsky.social · 23h
What will the world be like in 10 years? Or 50? We don't know – but we all need to think about long-term data storage. Don't get locked out 🔒 of your own documents – instead, choose a format designed for long-term archiving: blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/11...
ODF logo
November 10, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Daniel MacPhee 🇨🇦
anneapplebaum.bsky.social
meanwhile, even more people will lose healthcare
donmoyn.bsky.social Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 23h
New at Can We Still Govern? New Medicaid work requirements will see an estimated 5 million lose coverage.
Small investments in in-house tech capacity could allow states to start preparing now to expand automatic renewal of clients. Here is the evidence 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-a-van-...
Lessons from Pandemic Era Medicaid Automation for Work Requirements
Small tech capacity investments offer big returns
donmoynihan.substack.com
November 10, 2025 at 3:33 PM