My unpopular science reform opinion is that journal name/reputation SHOULD be a good heuristic for trust/quality, and that’s what we should be trying to achieve.

Jonny Coates@jacoates.bsky.social · 4w ago

Another piece on trust signals from me! We absolutely must move away from the outdated thinking of peer review and towards a much more holistic approach. Out today! katinamagazine.org/content/arti...

Looking for open-science and meta-research events? Been tracking these in the past month, manual and automated. Encouraging to see that there are quite a few. If you want to see what I'm keeping track of: metaventory.vercel.app/events?view=...

perfect dead drop 10/10 no notes (the shrouds really make this)

I don't mind paying for high quality journalism but there's so many outlets it costs too much to subscribe to all of them. More places should do micro-transactions to read individual articles OR have some kind of platform you can buy credits on to access individual articles from different outlets

Great symposium this morning at the #EASP2026 conference: “Who critiques the critique? Toward a reflexive metascience,” with presenters @ameliazein.bsky.social, @mariogollwitzer.bsky.social, @fgabarrot.bsky.social, and me!

😵‍💫

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3mo ago

"911, what's your emergency?" "Hello, Police? Yeah, our highest award recipient is at our meeting handing out copies of an article that we published. And uh....we....well....shit, nevermind." (gift link)

My article "What does it mean to understand AI?" is out now in Harvard Data Science Review! I discuss mechanistic interpretability, representation engineering, world models, and Potemkin understanding from philosophical perspectives. hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/w1tfg5lx...

What Does It Mean to Understand AI?

hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu

Fee-waived PhD available in #Forensicpsychology supervised by my collaborator Sofia Persson at Leeds Beckett University: www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/research-deg... Start: October, Deadline: May 13th. The project is about Rape Myth Interventions. Please share with any motivated psychology students!

Really interesting post from Tom's newsletter (as always) about how AI disrupts the 'signal' of how much effort someone is putting in to communicate with you (e.g. in a job application). So, perhaps creating new signals to demonstrate you have NOT used AI is the way to make yourself stand out...

Tom Stafford@tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 4mo ago

Here's Saturday's newsletter about how an online freelancing marketplace reacted when the site introduced an AI tool to help freelancers produce their proposals for offered jobs. Proposal quality went up, but became decoupled from worker ability and effort - it's value as a signal collapsed […]

Replacing expensive human workers with AI seems like a good cost cutting measure until you realise that once you've publicly announced to the world your business is now dependent on AI you're hostage to paying whatever the AI companies want to charge you

Michael Cook@mikecookwrites.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Also, she *will* ask for a raise, when the AI company inevitably puts the price up.

The SCORE investigation of repeatability and credibility is a lot. There are a few ways to get your head around it. 1: The Nature collection includes 3 papers from SCORE, an amazing paper from @i4replication.bsky.social and several commentaries about the work. www.nature.com/collections/... 1/

Reliable research in the social and behavioural and sciences

Sweeping new investigations probe the replication, robustness and reproducibility of results across the behavioural and social sciences.

nature.com

Excited and happy to report that we (@ccmmody.bsky.social, Ewout Meijer, Marielle Prevoo, Yannis Stravrakakis, Penelope Bollini, and I) will be able to start the new project "Invisible knowledge work and the transformation and scaling of open science practices". This is a unique project --> 1/2

Enjoyed this episode of @hpspodcast.bsky.social from last year with Heather Douglas about the social contract of science. Interesting discussion about 6 'types' of science and how they should be funded, relevant to a lot of current #metascience discourse. More 'science courts'! shorturl.at/QSdJI

S5 E4 - Heather Douglas on Rethinking Science’s Social Contract

open.spotify.com

The School of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University where I work is recruiting new lecturers, both research-focused (shorturl.at/zexaA) and teaching focused (shorturl.at/EhHrf) I'm not involved in the recruitment but feel free to reach out to me for a chat about working here! #academicsky

Genuinely interested whether the UKRI Metascience Novelty indicators project considered "ideological opposition to AI and novelty indicators" in their risks to delivery, given the amount of hate im seeing towards it

AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.

Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science

What happens when we go from replication crisis to robustness extremes?

open.substack.com

At last an AI tool I can get behind “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.” antirender.com

We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”

A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On

We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”

404media.co

There’s no ‘could’ about doing less research. Colleagues here being told they can’t go for bids that don’t cover overhead (ie all the charity funders)

Glen O'Hara@gsoh31.bsky.social · last yr.

Here's some more craziness from the waste of tax money in Higher Education: state R&D spending is huge, but pouring it into a collapsing system risks just pouring loads of it away. Making everything dependent on a Wild West of undergrad recruitment has gone spectacularly wrong.

Really enjoyed this episode of @bjkspod.bsky.social with @mbaldwin.bsky.social talking about the history (and possible future) of peer review: www.buzzsprout.com/1390924/epis... Interesting to learn just how recent the idea that "research must be peer reviewed" is (70's), and that its original...

115. Melinda Baldwin: A triple history of Nature, scientific journals, and peer review - BJKS Podcast

Melinda Baldwin is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. We talk about her work studying the history of Nature, scientific journals more broadly, what it means to be a scien...

buzzsprout.com

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

Which Kind of Science Reform

What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.

elevanth.org

Why I'm more optimistic than others about metascience (or metaresearch) (I wanted to write up some thoughts on #metascience2025 but I just don't have the time so this thread will have to do.)

This is an interesting reflection on the relationship between metascience and research culture. There’s some excellent and relevant work that gets done under the banner of “research culture”, especially around things like inclusivity, recognition, and community building and I agree...

Prof Cat Davies@catdavies.bsky.social · last yr.

I had a thoroughly lovely time at #Metascience2025 but was struck by the lack of explicit mention of research culture or environment. What gives? And what’s the difference anyhow? Some train-journey thoughts on the symbiosis between metaresearch and research culture. www.linkedin.com/pulse/two-he...

as spectator and also participant in various metascience-informed things like prereg, github etc, I can't help but notice a parallel between metascience-as-management (rather than science) and academic-leadership-as-management (rather than academic leadership)

Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · last yr.

So yeah exactly my curiosity about the deprioritization of science in "science of science".

If a drug company funds a study showing that their product is highly effective, we would be rightly skeptical of the results; if tech companies fund #metascience into how AI can improve science should we be equally sceptical?

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Looking forward to being part of the panel at this online event this afternoon on critical Metascience, I'll be talking about the alignment between open research reforms and academic capitalism. Details in the post below 👇 #metascience

RMZ HU@hu-rmz.bsky.social · last yr.

Next Monday (23.06, 4pm) our team member S. Bartscherer co-organises a Pre-Conference Virtual Symposium on "Critical #Metascience: Does Metascience Need to Change?" bringing together key voices from a variety of disciplines. Register in the link below: nomadit.co.uk/confer... @ibi-hu.bsky.social

A sunny Friday afternoon so I'm in a beer garden working my way through my stack of "interesting papers to read" and thought I'd do a mini thread of the best. Today's paper (actually a book chapter) is Jochen Gläser's 2019 "how can governance change research content?" doi.org/10.4337/9781...

This is a great post and really underscores the need for metascience reforms to seriously consider the context of their implementation, and the impact this has on researchers - "Get to know your audience"

Anouk Bouma@anoukbouma.bsky.social · last yr.

I wrote a blogpost on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how metascientists could (and should) think more about their users when designing tools and reforms. Would love to hear any thoughts on this topic! #metascience #usercentered