Just submitted a highly amusing abstract to the International Research Integrity Conference (Sydney, November). Whatever the outcome, hope to see you there! Abstracts close on Monday. researchintegrityconf.com

Some folks confuse these things —who think the 'water movement' must be flawed, since bottled water is expensive, and contaminated water is poisonous. Clean water and #openaccess both cost $. We don't really need corporations selling packaged products, but communities funding reservoirs and taps.

Is there a mathematical term for the most difficult sets to sort? And why does that term perfectly explain the kind of mess that six year old’s prefer?

Even honest research results can flip – a new approach to assessing robustness in the social sciences #ResearchIntegrity #ResearchMisconduct #WCRI2026 #WCRI blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2...

My daughter made this clay model, and stuck it on my webcam. So, if we’re chatting, know that I’m also speaking with a jaunty goose.

If Melbourne University Publishing doesn’t want to keep publishing Meanjin, they should hand over the journal to someone worthy of the responsibility. Me in The Conversation theconversation.com/the-decision...

It boggles my mind that anyone would submit their work to any journal that they do not also read. #Academicsky

The use of #AI tools in health care raises questions about patient informed consent, necessitating a framework to decide when disclosure is needed. Learn more in this Perspective. ja.ma/424oPR6

Navigating Open Research: A Guide for Early Career Researchers. Great work from the CONUL Research Group. Free to download zenodo.org/records/1702... #irishResearch #openResearch

Pethick et al. Is There a Reproducibility Crisis? On the Need for Evidence-based Approaches www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #OpenScience

I vibecoded this little tool for detecting duplications and clones within scientific figures. I think it works ok! Please try it. There are sample images you can try. Free to use. Not nearly as good as the paid models, obviously. 👉 dejaview.streamlit.app #researchintegrity @elisabethbik.bsky.social

🌟 REACH is live! A new digital magazine on research integrity & open science. 📖 In this issue: ✨ Launch of the Science Integrity Alliance ✨ Coverage of the U.S. Conference on Research Integrity ✨ COPE’s evolution in publication ethics ...and more! 🔗 Read here: www.sci-integrity.com/reach-inaugu...

The Gantt Chart templates that universities offer their postgraduate students are some of the ugliest things I've ever seen.

A new #Nature story investigates a preprint by #AusHSI Prof @aidybarnett.bsky.social, which has found that peer reviewers are more likely to approve articles that cite their own work. When the reasons for citing are hard to justify, this can make the peer-review process transactional. #peerreview

Consider studying #philosophy. It’s fun, and: “Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning…” theconversation.com/studying-phi...

New paper: Tackling paper mills requires us to prevent future contamination and clean up the past – the case of the journal Bioengineered With @deadneanderthals.bsky.social, @smutclyde.bsky.social, @mortenoxe.bsky.social, @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social, and me www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Two academics emailed me, saying kind things about my work. This honestly made my week. If your Friday allows time, hammer-out a quick note that might make someone else's week. Let's emulate the good ones.

A paper that combines #peerreview & cheese... what could be better? Answer: writing said paper with @abalkina.bsky.social @image-integrity.bsky.social & Marie Souliere. Read on to learn how the Swiss Cheese Model could help peer review & #researchintegrity onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

“There are only three classes of men that we in general have no patience with — superiors, inferiors, and equals.” - Walter Savage Landor [hat-tip Michael Gilleland]

My 6-yr-old just described $9.80 as twenty-to-ten, as if money can be described like time, and this has shaken me.

“This LLM writes at a PhD Level” sounds a lot like, “This machine produces barista-grade coffee at the touch of a button”.

🆕 New research: Med students & researchers both miss many duplicated images in papers No big difference between groups. Tools & clearer guidelines needed. researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #ResearchIntegrity #WCRI2026 #OpenScience #PeerReview

The best way to protect the scientific record is to prevent stats errors from entering it in the first place! Two weeks 'til our webinar featuring @tomhardwicke.bsky.social & @michelenuijten.bsky.social. Register here: qut.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

To me, every talk with a title like “How to Get Published in High Impact Journals” has the same vibes as “How to get rich with Realestate”.

Great article!

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

The NHMRC has today released a Good Institutional Practice Guide. I'm biased, because I was involved in its development, but I think it's a great document that the Australian research community really needs. www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/pub...

Neat essay on how one can help students reach beyond mastery of facts and protocols to be able thinkers, principled researchers and virtuous scientists. @natchem.nature.com rdcu.be/ey1FO by Dominic Chaloner, MichelleFrancl, T. Ryan Byerly.

The call for proposals is now up for our long awaited #AIMOS2025 conference in Sydney this November: aimos-inc.github.io/aimos.confer...

When chess.com detects cheaters, they shouldn’t immediately tell them or ban them, but instead only pair them against other cheaters for 2 weeks, and stream those games publicly on a 24hr feed. Would watch. Then, ban them obvsly. #chess

Nice article on cultural change in the research sector: "meaningful change will require a nuanced understanding of the way that rules, norms, and incentives can interact in complex ways, and sometimes conflict, even when they are supposed to promote the very same outcomes” #researchintegrity

“Nothing we say here is against the use of proxies, which are useful, necessary, and unavoidable. The risks occur when we blindly pursue the proxy itself, use the wrong proxies, or mistake the proxy for the thing itself.” Michael Vincent‪ & @markhooper.bsky.social’s new work on research integrity.

We discuss cultural change initiatives to promote #researchintegrity. We distinguish 2 schemas of research integrity: 👉The thick, lived kind 👉The thin, rule-based kind. We need both. What’s interesting is trying to understand how they relate. Had fun writing this! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Objectively good choice, Australia. #Hottest100

Nature News has a short piece on the survey we did in conjunction with the FAIRS meeting on responding to serious research misconduct www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“The bottom line is that the images need to represent accurately what was observed experimentally.” Today @nature.com, @sarareardon.bsky.social talks to @elisabethbik.bsky.social @helenajambor.bsky.social & Jana Christopher about the do's and don'ts of image editing in science. 🧪

Going through old books to clear shelf space, and donate. Look what I found! Precious four-leaf clovers. And one fiver! The pages of a Bob Dylan lyrics book are a good place to be pressed, I think. I was given this book for my 18th birthday. Perhaps I can keep it.

Fabrication of scientific images is easy and common. If you’re in doubt, go to PubPeer, search “duplication”, & consider the number of dodgy figures discovered in the past hours and days. Can't ignore the problem! Need to discuss it in the open, and better education. #researchintegrity #academicsky

New idea for a card game: “Tortured Academia”. It's based, of course, on the comic tragedy of tortured phrases in publishing ethics. You have to guess the proper academic term based on the absurd description. Fuller explanation on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/mark-h... #researchintegrity

I’m not a stoic, but agree very much about a stick for indifference to university ranking systems.

Seems like positive news to me! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Hemingway had this nice idea about stopping work ‘mid-thought’, when the next step is clear. Makes it more exciting to get back to work in the morning. “I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.” [Hemingway, Moveable Feast]

new paper by @deadneanderthals.bsky.social and colleagues documenting the disturbing phenonmenon of stealth corrections in the scientific literature onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I made an icon on the Noun Project about six years ago.This is my running total profit. Killing it!

Apparently libraries like to claim February 14th as "Library Lovers Day". I'm all for it. And as a person who once worked for universities, but no longer has access to university libraries, let me tell you mournfully that it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.

Image detection tools are wild. Consider this PubPeer comment by @sholtodavid.bsky.social : pubpeer.com/publications... However long I looked, I couldn't see the match. But I put them in AfterEffects, messed with their rotation and proportions, and voilà! Would you see it by eye? #researchintegrity

Latest blogpost on Musk/Royal Society debacle: deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/02/seve... I look at the reasons that have been given for inaction, and find them wanting. @royalsociety.org

Great to see @jabyrnesci.bsky.social 's work being recognised: www.science.org.au/news-and-eve...

Like it! Interesting comparison of different codes by a Sankey plot.

Adding “so rogue governments can’t delete your stuff” to the list of reasons why researchers should share their data