Fascinating case study for sociologists of science – a long paper on trustworthiness of science that never uses the word "fraud". It does mention "misconduct", but only once...

Yes, honey, I'm thinking about the Roman Empire again.. it's important context when reading this NYT article! www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/u... #Trump

I am a noisy, even if relatively unbiased, estimator.

Here's my conversation with Mu Yang on Metascience Matters: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2EK... We discussed her work as a scientific sleuth, academic incentives for positive data, individual cases she has pursued, and why she loves being a sleuth. Also on Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/16R6...

I started a podcast! Metascience Matters features conversations with metascientists. Two episodes are live: Chirag Patel on Exposomics, and Vibration of Effects: youtu.be/RT2nypyb-iM?... @floriannaudet.bsky.social on Clinical Trials, Registered Reports, and Psychiatry: youtu.be/fn4qtnc99Xo?...

Rejecting another Elsevier review request. Hoping my attempt at a dispassionate tone keeps my contempt for Elsevier from leaking through.

Here comes the big AI slop wave of 'scientific' manuscripts!

Is AI killing publishing reform? Important post by Ulrike Hahn about #scholarlyPublishing. (write.as/ulrikehahn/i...) I've had the same thought, that the flood of LLM-written junk and fraudulent manuscripts being submitted to journals means that

Good to see some backbone from US senior academics

1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme... haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...

The Open Journals Collective (@ojcollective.bsky.social‬) has just launched and already includes 75 journals! www.openjournalscollective.org/catalogue/?q... I am enthusiastic about the OJC and how well it has been set up to advance diamond (free) open access, working with libraries and funders.

Former Texas Lege reporter here. A Dem hasn't held this seat since 1990. Tarrant is the safest of red suburban counties. There is no way the TX and national GOP aren't in panic mode right now.

This is a targeted attack on science media. Bhattacharya has slammed science media for what he calls biased coverage, but how are our readers — the global scientific community — supposed to understand his new agency priorities if we can't even get in the door?

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer” “a people... is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge.” -Hannah Arendt theconversation.com/repeated-gov...

Exciting to see this launch. Been in the works for a long time, with dozens or possibly hundreds of journals involved, and major library institutions, banding together for sustained support of free to read, free to publish in, open access journals. #openaccess

For a weekly seminar class, I'm looking for pairings of psych popularization with scholarly take-downs of the underlying research. I want students to see examples of how shoddy research gets hyped.

The annals of Elsevier villainy are extensive, but perhaps their funniest gambit was when they started six "Australasian" fake journals that were really just sponsored publications for pharmaceutical companies, set up to launder their marketing as ostensibly peer-reviewed research.

See you in Melbourne in Nov 2027, SIPSers and AIMOSers! #metascience

Fossil study suggests that early vertebrates had four eyes! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Many, like we mammals, through evolution reduced to just two eyes and shifted from the pineal gland system. Meanwhile, some organisms like the tuatara lizard have maintained a third, pineal eye.

“’'This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips. It is clear they are not welcome in Milan, without a doubt,’' Sala [Milan Mayor] told RTL Radio 102 before ICE’s deployment to the Games was confirmed."

What would your university do? What should it do? www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Excellent analysis! Including e.g. Trump's own crude take, "You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms… they’ll find a reason to impeach me."

Comparing registrations to published papers is essential to research integrity - and almost no one does it routinely because it's slow, messy, and time-demanding. RegCheck was built to help make this process easier. Today, we launch RegCheck V2. 🧵 regcheck.app

NYT video analysis confirms victim’s gun was removed before he was shot. So he was unarmed. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/us/minneapolis-shooting-federal-agents-video.html

Moments before the first shot is fired, this federal agent can be seen retreating with a gun. It appears to match the general appearance of the firearm posted by DHS, including the red dot sight. This agent’s back is turned when the first shot occurs. x.com/BillMelugin_...

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

the nba postponed a game because the united states government is killing its citizens

As I (alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/c...) and others have been saying for years, we need chain of evidence custody for scientific data, to have some assurance that at least the data behind the BS that people write (and now AIs, on a larger scale) is real.

Smoking salvia divinorum also tends to make you experience non-existent sentient beings, although not of any particular size(!), as we discussed in this paper (www.frontiersin.org/journals/int...)

Kent, Essex and apparently Sussex all decline to be gouged by Elsevier Read & Publish deals. Others may well follow. 1/2

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Penalise ‘retraction hotspot’ universities, says integrity expert: Indian campaigner Achal Agrawal says research watchdog he founded gets tens of tip-offs regarding suspected malpractice every day www.timeshighereducation.com/news/penalis...

Cave art (hand stencils) dated to 67,000 years ago, older than any other known, and in the migration route in Indonesia of those who who first populated Australia theconversation.com/humanitys-ol...

1/ I'm seeking expressions of interest from nonprofit organizations to take over the Open Access Tracking Project (#OATP, @oatp#OATP and the open-source software (#TagTeam) on which it runs. Details in this Google doc: https://bit.ly/TransferOATP Contact me <[email protected]> if you have any […]

I'm excited to be organising the joint EPC*-APCV^ meeting in Auckland this year, with @sampendu.bsky.social @courtneybhilton.bsky.social @paulcorballis.bsky.social & Chris Erb. Info here! visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026/ *Experimental Psych. Conference ^Asia-Pacific Conf. on Vision

This seems to be based entirely on the Project Implicit sample, as reported in the un-refereed preprint linked from the NYT piece. Seems premature to declare this as fact in the NYT.

"Artificial-intelligence systems are feeding on Wikipedia without giving back, and academic indifference is threatening the survival of what is arguably the most widely used reference work on the planet." www.nature.com/articles/d41... Check out the WikiJournal of Science, created to address this.

OMG this guy has named/characterized 450 nudibranch species, what an inspiration. #realHeroes Hope you don't have to login to Meta to see this. www.instagram.com/reel/DTf3QRg...

if you want to give wikipedia a birthday present, edit an article! volunteer labor is wikipedia’s most valuable resource and always has been!!!!

tangential, but one of the most remarkable episiodes in the history of science to me is that fact that people in the 19th century correctly inferred the basic facts about the physiology of color vision by doing math on our color phenomenology

Happy update from an innovative openaccess non-profit that has done much to enable communities to create journals and the like, without getting captured by corporate publishers. #openaccess

You sweat in your basement for years writing a book, working that nobody will ever read it - or that they will think you are a complete raving idiot, but then you read an astonishing, soul-warming, got-everything review like this and suddenly you feel like your whole life is not actually a waste.

This rings, & I ask myself everyday if it’s time to go. But I went to NIH to support future careers. I’m in 1 of the divisions hardest hit by terminations. Pushback from the community has helped us lessen some of the damage. We can still support trainees & take our oaths seriously.

“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”

Scientific funding is a net negative: "European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Continuing the fine tradition of declining to review for Nature Publishing Group, in my case @natmentalhealth.nature.com for all the fine reasons Alex descibed in this letter. The APC for this journal is £9190.00/$12690.00/€10690.00. Join us!

Fascinating finds of large-scale murder/sacrifice that ends a European civilisation, possibly

Wow- the world has changed. Such a job exists. #metascience

The Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology, was a v. stimulating and well-organized meeting! I spoke about better contributing contributors to psychology and philosophy research projects. After outlining 3 routes, I focused on the oft-neglected route of improving Acknowledgments. #ASPP25

The BBC's has responded in The Guardian that this was a routine editorial decision, but also that it was made on legal advice. Those two explanations don’t fit together. /1