how I feel when open science initiatives choose to publish in Nature

Finally here! i've got super high hopes for this new platform especially after earlier T&F experiences-- will keep submitting & others should too, all fingers cross for its success

The @ec.europa.eu journal Open Research Europe has been a total mess every time we submit: undisclosed AI proofreading, AI reviewers & AI editors-- now a colleague getting a rejection without any information. Why @erc.europa.eu accepts this as paid service from F1000 (by Taylor & Francis)? 🧵

Once again, a long post with strong opinions. It's probably twice as long as it should be, it's also repetitive and written in affect. And you probably disagree with my argument. So maybe you shouldn't read it. On the other hand, most things worth reading are written in affect.

The nonprofit journal classification JUFO needs your input. Starting 2026, journals are ranked from "none" to Levels 1 and 2-- here you can directly influence scientific assessment. Leave positive notes for journals that deserve it, negative for crappy venues julkaisufoorumi.fi/en/news/prop...

Null results as such isn't the problem, sometimes null is surprising itself (something that should work *doesn't* after all)-- this is rather an epistemic problem where ppl feel the need to claim meaning for their work via binary significance rhetoric that's simple enough for the internet

European Commission's formal analysis of TikTok has concluded today & finds it to represent 'addictive design' --great that someone is doing this work but would really appreciate some transparency in the process so that experts (like myself) could understand ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

First post of the year, new paper out today: we present possibly the biggest case of systematic Measurement Schmeasurement in tech use. It seems that most studies on gaming (videogame) addiction/disorder haven't measured gaming after all. This research took years, so long 🧵 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

This is my anecdotal exp of the world too, been thinking about the reasons often-- a) it takes time to find the thing you both love & have the talent for so starting a bit behind is logical, b) talent ≠ long-term performance, those with talent alone shine bright before slowly falling behind

The important question that isn't talked about enough is that no one wants to define "important question"-- except prestige (mostly for-profit) journals

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

One of the best experiences in academia is to be an editor for a difficult paper & against all odds find that 1 reviewer in the world who fully gets it, receiving brilliantly constructive review-- feels like having solved a puzzle, collective epiphany, knowing our mutual understanding makes progress

"psychology, too, can in its own way proceed from the 'fire and water' level to a more advanced level of concepts" (Lewin 1951) 2026 starting soon: still on the fire and water level

Journal of Philosophical Logic (springer nature) editorial board resigned-- opened new diamond journal under the name Philosophical Logic www.openlibhums.org/media/press/...

Great article about fertility in South Korea. That motherhood penalty 😳 worksinprogress.co/issue/two-is...

Hands down the most genuine, reflexive, & sensible take on AI as far as my memory goes-- this is canon

Been thinking about the practical implications of the recent EU court of justice ruling where data are now defined by the recipient: even if the data is pseudonymous for you, it can be anonymous for *others* if they don't hold decryption key curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/...

Feeling (unfortunately) good about my decision to say no this year to SPC'ing or reviewing for any big AI conferences. Lots being written about the (generally not great) review quality, but the other side is equally bad or worse. Torrent of low-quality submissions, aggressive bad-faith authors, etc.

Confused about the moral of this story

last night my daughter asked whether there were negative letters, like negative numbers. what a good fuckin question

This is the most worrying part the current system and the #1 issue to be tackled with our remaining brain cells, what can be done to a) reduce shit, b) transform shit into more thoughtful work

Agree with many things in the talk & communicating this with detail is valuable work but picking a small thing that many repeatedly overlook imo: quality control does *not* equal prestige-- journal prestige is generated by a process of selection for impact

Thinking: to what extent AI slop etc publishing problems apply to humanities & qual studies? sure there's been some wild cases there too but intuition says it's better protected-- when the entire contribution is conveyed in language (not numbers), feels more difficult to deceive readers

A decade ago when streaming became mainstream I predicted choose-your-own-adventure videos would turn into a hit genre-- was totally wrong, now doubling down for short-form CYOA magazine.weverse.io/article/view...

I'm curious if someone who studies this can explain the mechanism for "processing -> negative health"? -- never understood this over the last 20 years & wikipedia says processing is just a synonym for junk food in this context

But who has the time for validity considerations when the deadlines are next month

Reminds how back in the days Riot publicly insisted that only 2% of their users express verbal toxicity-- turned out that to be classified "toxic" one had to be flagged by peers literally *hundreds* of times within a couple of days

This is such a key hermeneutic for older texts, there's always stuff going on behind the scenes, the thing that's being built on

I don't know anyone who has worked deeply with RRs (authors/editors/reviewers) who'd support something like this for so many reasons-- a friendly reminder that RRs are a tool for certain scenarios, definitely underused, and like any other tool, to be used wisely

Many EU/US ppl say they must keep submitting to these publishers bc it'd be unfair for co-author students not to-- fair enough sometimes, but if one is a student in a major uni and/or working for a known lab, they've already got a top 1% global advantage without prestige publishing, they'll be ok

New WHO-collaborated (HBSC) study, n=44k, finds that boys who never play games have the same amount of gaming disorder symptoms vs those who play daily-- it's 2025, what are we doing? measurement?

📢 Register for the 5th Helsinki Initiative webinar (8 December) on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication with presentations by @tatsuya-amano.bsky.social, @karenstroobants.bsky.social and Andre Brasil! More information and registration: www.helsinki-initiative.org/en/events/5t...

One of my all-time fav rants on this topic-- especially love this figure demonstrating how expert clinicians fail to agree on major depression diagnosis most of the time (57%) based on DSM5 field trials

The reason why this is interesting & maybe even promising is: it isn't simply "less human scrutiny" but but a shift from reviewer trust to editor trust--

Having a reward like this is ok to increase visibility of alternatives but it also struggles to address the real problem: the system remains broken bc contracts (=lives) of many ppl globally depend on publishing in metrics journals, they don't have a choice

Many ppl think of registered reports as a tool for bias control (for good historic reasons) but ime this is the truly useful part of RRs: get feedback on the *design* before it's too late --not specific to h-testing but applies to any kind of data, method, or study in general

My most popular cartoon by a long chalk is also oddly niche, in that it mostly appeals to a generation who remember the song it refers to and enjoy the nostalgia for their youth. I can draw one for you if you like. www.worldofmoose.com/collections/...

The good kind of provocative perspective worth reading by HCI/games tech folks too but want to add one thing, which is hinted there but could be even more explicit: the role of publishers in this actor network

I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social. We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits. tiu.nu/22989

This book probably made some kind of world record for peer review / publication time-- abstracts sketched in 2016 (first full chapter dl 2017) so the process took 10 good years

This is a brilliant slide & captures a core dynamic of information transfer in science not only for methods but also domain knowledge, theory, and everything else --gap from cutting edge to ZPD will always remain huge; core work in a field will always happen in-between

Notwithstanding, please do make your concerns heard; respond by the end of this week (24 October 2025): ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet...

There's a trend to add equivalence tests to all planned hypotheses -- never seen these considered for alpha even tho it's an extra test for the literally same hypothesis (happy to learn why if a sensible reason for it exists)

Every chapter in this philosophy of psychiatry monument is pure joy & gold-- today it was @ent3c.bsky.social 's reply to Borsboom, and it resonates not only with psychopathology but also what's happening in social sciences more widely academic.oup.com/book/25042

The meeting notes of this autumn's JUFO board meeting are out & can say these are the most interesting meta-science published every time they come out (highlights🧵) julkaisufoorumi.fi/sites/defaul...

Been this year in the JUFO panel evaluating journals & learned some interesting things, such as: the criterion that a journal to qualify for any formal recognition it needs a board with ppl representing diverse institutions /3

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

Didn't read all but seems v ambitious eg "Ministry of Education and Culture will convene a strategic group to develop an internationally competitive operational environment for responsible openness in research through the vision for higher education and research [&] permanent operational structures"

How COIs operate in social science & humanities is a huge topic that few talk about, not least as it's damn difficult grasp the tons of variation in RQs, epistemologies, and histories of fields --

"Subjectively, the surface of human behavior is phenomenology; objectively it is meaning. Commitment to phenomenology and meaning, despite their scientific impenetrability, is the indelible mark of a human science."