Academic Life and Culture

 

Race to the Bottom: Competition and Quality in Science

This paper investigates how competition to publish first and thereby establish priority impacts the quality of scientific research. We begin by developing a model where scientists decide whether and how long to work on a given project. When deciding …

Raising awareness of uncertain choices in empirical data analysis: A teaching concept toward replicable research practices

Throughout their education and when reading the scientific literature, students may get the impression that there is a unique and correct analysis strategy for every data analysis task and that this analysis strategy will always yield a significant …

Recommendations for empowering early career researchers to improve research culture and practice

Early career researchers (ECRs) are important stakeholders leading efforts to catalyze systemic change in research culture and practice. Here, we summarize the outputs from a virtual unconventional conference (unconference), which brought together 54 …

Reflections on the Unintended Consequences of the Science Reform Movement

The scientific community has entered a challenging era, as originally noted by Wagenmakers . High-profile instances of fraud, failures to replicate foundational studies in psychology, and admissions of research misconduct cast a shadow over the …

Reimagining peer review: the emergence of peer community in registered reports system

The traditional peer review process in medicine faces a crisis marked by publication delays, potential bias, and a lack of transparency. These issues hinder scientific progress and undermine the credibility of published medical findings, which inform …

Renovating the Theatre of Persuasion. ManyLabs as Collaborative Prototypes for the Production of Credible Knowledge

In response to various perceived crises in science, changes to the organization, conduct and publication of science have been proposed and implemented under the label of ‘reform’. This paper dives into the new collaborative form of the ManyX study …

Representing epistemic and disciplinary diversity in open research

On 10 February 2024, I gave a lightning talk at FOSDEM 2024's Open Research Online Devroom titled “Representing epistemological and disciplinary diversity in open research discourse”. It was informed by incredible feedback I received from various …

Reputation Without Practice? A Dynamic Computational Model of the Unintended Consequences of Open Scientist Reputations

Practicing open science can have benefits for the career prospects of individual researchers or labs through higher quality work and increased chances of publication. However, being an outspoken advocate of open science might also indirectly benefit …

Research and data lessons from a non-academic job

It’s been one year after leaving academia and starting to work for a charity organisation. For a bit of context, I did my PhD in Psychology, after which I spent four years across two postdocs (one in France, one in England) and I got to the point …

Research Culture is Broken; Open Science can Fix It

After the increasingly toxic environment of modern research culture forced her to nearly abandon her career, astrophysicist Dr Rachael Ainsworth began to question why the subject she loved had become so inhospitable. Identifying some of the pressures …