Screen shot of section 1.1 of the report "vision for a new publication culture"

The governing body for 14 Dutch universities (UNL) has published a "Vision on Publication Culture" that is so inspiring and forward thinking. Worth a read for those trying to changes publishing and research assessment practices.

Take a read:

www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/files/public...

Come join this project to study a form of peer review that focuses on the methods instead of the results.

I'm already a postdoc on the team so hit me up if you have any questions!

Rethinking (un)blinding in biomedical proposal peer review: A multi-stakeholder qualitative study Many peer review attributes are widely criticized and poorly investigated, particularly in the context of proposals’ peer review. This study aims to explore stakeholders’ perspectives on the role o...

📝 Latest Article Alert! 📝

"Rethinking (un)blinding in biomedical proposal peer review: A multi-stakeholder qualitative study"

Seba Qussini, Farizah Mezer Anami & Kris Dierickx

→ doi.org/10.1080/0898...

#PeerReview
#AcademicPublishing
#MedicalScience
#BioMedicine

Checking for Statistical Errors in Primary Studies: A Way to Improve Meta-Analytic Evidence? — Meta-Research Center This blogpost was written by dr. Olmo van den Akker. He is a postdoc in our department working on two projects: a systematic review of studies that simulate p-hacking, and a randomized controlled tria...

Should we use error checking tools like Statcheck and GRIM to automatically check for errors in studies in meta-analyses?

I wrote a blog post with some insights from a hackathon where we scrutinized this idea.

metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/3/...

PYMS - Lunch Presentations Between 20 and 24 April, PYMS will be hosting a series of online lunch meetings. During these sessions, you can present one of your completed research projects, an ongoing study, or early‑stage ideas ...

📢 New from PYMS!

We're launching online lunch meetings. A chance to present your work to other metascience ECRs

Share your work in any form: finished projects, preliminary results, a trial-run conference presentation, or ideas you'd love feedback on

Want to present? Sign up using the form!

On 24 April, I will speak at the @emspofficial.bsky.social conference about making studies using patient registry data more transparent.

It means a lot to me because a close friend was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis just last year. Hope to learn a lot there!

#EMSP2026

You still have time to sign up for the upcoming workshop of PMGS.
@denolmo.bsky.social will guide you through evaluating and writing high quality preregistration.
See more and sign up here:
paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/pr...

That sounds like a lot! What were the reasons for concerns/retractions?

I wrote a blog for the Meta-Research Center expressing my infinite frustration about not getting data. What else is new, you might think? Well, I added an extra layer of annoyance directed at the journals who do NOTHING to enforce promised data sharing.

metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/2/...

Introducing the EEG and ERP Methods Template: Q&A with Gisela Govaart and Antonio Schettino Interview with Gisela Govaart and Antonio Schettino, developers of the new ERP preregistration template on the Open Science Framework (OSF).

Now available on the OSF as part of a growing collection of preregistration resources, the new EEG & ERP Methods template guides researchers through every stage of ERP study planning. In our Q&A, two of its creators share how the template can help researchers at all stages:

New tool exposes scale of fake research flooding cancer science A new machine learning tool has identified more than 250,000 cancer research papers that may have been produced by so-called “paper mills”.

“If fabricated studies make their way into the evidence base, they can mislead real scientists and ultimately slow progress for patients."

Published in The BMJ, a new AI tool developed by @aidybarnett.bsky.social and colleagues has exposed the scale of fake studies flooding cancer research.

Is ‘open science’ delivering benefits? Major study finds proof is sparse It’s hard to measure social and economic impacts of making papers and data free, researchers say

#OA articles are cited more, help citizen scientists learn more about the topic they've helped on, but there’s little strong evidence they have other long-lasting effects on research, or many economic and social benefits www.science.org/content/arti...
@jeffreybrainard.bsky.social @science.org

ChatGPT, are these rhetorical questions?

Ha, I'm also in Sydney atm! It was pretty fiery when I went for a run this afternoon. Are you here for a conference?

Proposal to use more nicknames when talking about scientific researchers, the fun of which is nicely illustrated by James "cheaters' bane" Heathers in his acknowledgement slide.

#AIMOS2025
@jamesheathers.bsky.social

Slide by Lisa Bero on commercial funding of research. No further comment necessary, I think.

#AIMOS2025

ROB-ME: a tool for assessing risk of bias due to missing evidence in systematic reviews with meta-analysis Various methods are available to help users assess whether selective non-publication of studies or selective non-reporting of study results has occurred, but not its impact on a meta-analysis. This li...

What is the best reporting guideline acronym? ROB-ME by @mjpages.bsky.social gets my preliminary vote.

Any other good ones, #AIMOS2025?

Hi GRIOS, is the contact form on your website functional? I sent a message just after Metascience25 but haven't heard back yet.

@michelenuijten.bsky.social

🔓 It's great to see authors sharing their experiences with publishing on MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) — our open review platform for metascience using the publish–review–curate model: www.openscience.nl/en/cases/the...

Here's another conference that aims to bridge fields: errorsin.science/pse8/

In Leiden from 11-13 Feb 2026 (submission deadline 15 October)

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

- Journals should state what their aims and scope are from the outset and implement mechanisms to assess whether they achieve those aims. This could also be things like "we want to publish high risk research"
- Meta-research is necessary to find out which journals deserve prestige

#PRC10

- "The replication crisis forced changes in transparency for the research itself, but not for the publication process"
- We need to raise our expectations for journals? How? Nullius in verba (don't take their word for it!)

#PRC10

Many interesting tidbits in @simine.com's talk. A selection:
- Journal prestige depends on factors like aims and scope, selectivity, and impact factor, but changes in these factors do not always lead to changes in journal prestige - journal prestige is sticky

#PRC10

There is also a publish-review-curate publishing platform specifically dedicated to meta-research: metaror.org

Send your studies on peer review there and be part of the future of science!

(CoI statement: I'm an ERC representative at MetaROR)

#PRC10

eLife (talk by Nicola Adamson) uses a publish-review-curate method and uses common terms to assess manuscripts.

For strength of evidence: exceptional, compelling, convincing, solid, incomplete, & inadequate

For significance of findings: landmark, fundamental, important, valuable, & useful

#PRC10

New peer review dataset incoming!

Involves authors, topic area, editorial decision, author characteristics (institutional prestige, region, gender), BoRE evaluations, review characteristics (length, sentiment, z-score, reviewer gender).

(Talk by Aaron Clauset)

#PRC10

Christos Kotanidis checked differences in abstracts between submissions and published papers & assessed whether these differences indicated higher or lower research quality.

Abstracts typically improved, especially in big five medical journals. Evidence for the effectiveness of peer review?

#PRC10

Andrea Corvillon on distributed vs. panel peer review at the ALMA Observatory:

Most experienced PIs no longer have the best ranks in a distributed review system, but why that is remains unclear.

#PRC10