Everything Hertz

We discuss the results from the cancer biology reproducibility project, the inevitable comparisons with reproducibility in psychology, and authorship expectations for posting public datasets. Links The paper investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology The paper on the impact of alphabetical order on career outcomes in economics (whose authorship order are determinedby alphabetica...

If your child asked you whether they should pursue a career in academia, what would you say? We discuss this question plus three more quick-fire topics: the death of expertise, memorable presentations, and including internships in more graduate programs Links Get a 30% discount on a Scite subscription for a year, just use the coupon code EVERYTHINGHERTZ via this link The “Remind me of this later”...

Dan and James discuss the differences between 'talk' and 'action' in scientific reform and why reforms are taking such a long time to be realised. They also chat about whether messy (but correct) code is worse than no code at all, and revisit the grad student who never said "no" . Other links Get a 30% discount on a Scite subscription for a year, just use the coupon code EVERYTHINGHERTZ via this l...

In this live episode, Dan and James discuss red flags in academia, in terms of research fields, papers, and individuals. Thanks to everyone that participated in this live event! Links to stuff that was mentioned Get a 30% discount on a Scite subscription for a year, just use the coupon code EVERYTHINGHERTZ via this link The p-hacker app Burro racing on Wikipedia Everything Hertz on social media Da...

We chat with Sakshi Ghai (University of Cambridge) about why we should diversify sample diversity and retire the Western, educated, rich, industrialized and democratic (WEIRD) dichotomy in the behavioral sciences Links to stuff we discuss: Sakshi's piece in Nature Human Behavior Many Labs 2 paper The ‘helicopter' research piece Joseph Heinrich’s recent book, The WEIRDest People in the World Everyt...

James proposes that peer review reports should be published as their own citable objects, provided that the manuscript author thinks that the peer review report is of sufficient quality and the peer reviewers agree Other links and things we discuss An update on James’ start up job The American service industry Dan’s first outing since the pandemic started The villlage of Hell , in Norway The villi...

We chat with Ashley Farley about her background as an academic librarian, the underrecognised importance of copyright in academic publishing, and her work as a Program Officer at the Gates Foundation An academic librarian’s perpsective on the importance of open reseasch The importance of copyright in research and what it means signing over your copyright The PDF crisis! What does a program officer...

We chat with Michele Avissar-Whiting about her role as the Editor-in-chief of the Research Square preprint platform and how she weighs up the benefits and costs of potentially problematic preprints during a pandemic. Notes, links, and stuff we cover: The Journal Ghoul reference in the intro Michele’s role as a the editor for a preprint server How Research Square works Weighing up the urgency of pr...

Dan and James share their thoughts on a recent paper that proposes ten rules for improving academic work-life balance for early career researchers and the figure from this paper that became a meme. Here are the rules: Long hours do not equal productive hours Examine your options for flexible work practices Set boundaries to establish your workplace and time Commit to strategies that increase your...

We discuss Journal Reviewer (journalreviewer.org), which is a website that provides a forum for researchers to share and rate their experiences with journal's peer review processes. We also cover how some journals negotiate the way in which their impact factors are calculated. Links The reference to James' mention of Dick Whittington James’ RIOT science talk Nichola's Raihani's tweet https://journ...

Dan Quintana and James Heathers chat about well-known psychology studies that we've now lost confidence in due to replication failures and the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis-driven research. Other links The reversals in psychology website Anne Scheel and team's paper on whether you’re ready to test hypotheses Homer Simpson burning bridges meme The paper that suggests replications will...

We discuss a recent retraction triggered by the authors not paying a copyright fee to use a questionnaire (that also happened to be critical of the original questionnaire). Links for stuff that we mention: The paper that was retracted for not getting the correct licence for a questionnaire The retraction notice for this paper The Spectrum piece that discusses this story Why most online recipes beg...

Some journals use nominal manuscript submission fees to discourage frivolous submissions. However, it has been suggested that increasing submission fees could reduce article processing charges. Dan and James discuss this proposal, along with the recently released code of conduct for scientific integrity from the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. James’ Atlantic piece Submission fees for mansuc...

Dan and James discuss how academia should operate in a post-pandemic world. What pandemic practices should we keep and what should we abandon? Links and details: Quiz: Norwegian metal band or Norwegian town? Things are slowly getting back to normal in some (but not alI) countries. So what academic practices and routines should we keep from the pandemic and what should we kiss goodbye? Would it be...

Dan and James answer listener audio questions on indirect costs for research grants, the mind/body problem, and why many academics aren't trained to teach. They also profess their love for the overhead projector Some more details: Should we require universities to justify overhead costs, like heating and electricity? Overheads can inflate the costs of grants, some grants provide an additional perc...

Dan and James chat with Dorothy Bishop (University of Oxford) about the importance of normalizing the retraction of scientific papers, publication ethics, and whether paper mills (companies that make fake papers at scale) are an issue in the psychological sciences Here are some links and stuff we covered: Dorothy's thoughts on how the adoption of open science practices has been progressing since w...

Dan and James discuss the recently proposed "transparency audit", why it received so much blowback, and the characteristics of successful reform schemes The specifics... The computational research integrity conference The transparancy leaderboard proposed by Curate Science Our episode with Chris Jackson , that James mentioned What about a transparency leaderboard for instiutions? What are the char...

Dan and James chat about how they come up with new ideas, why everyone seems to be trying to monetise their hobbies, and why it's so hard for most labs to have a singular focus of research. We had some problems with James' mic so the quality of his audio wasn't up our usual standard. To make up for this we've added one of our older bonus episodes at the end of this conventional episode (this begin...

We discuss when is the right time in your academic career to begin speaking up to critique your research field or whether the risk of retaliation means you should shut up and keep your head down. This was a recorded Clubhouse chat, which includes some audience interaction at the end. Links and details: Moin Syed's blogpost , which was the inspiration for this topic The 'proper' letter to the edito...

We have a wide-ranging chat with Saloni Dattani (Kings College London and University of Hong Kong) about the benefits of dividing scientific labor, the magazine she co-founded (Works in Progress) that shares novel ideas and stories of progress, and fighting online misinformation Here are some links and other stuff we cover Follow Saloni on Twitter: https://twitter.com/salonium Why Saloni started t...

Dan has a blue-sky proposal to increase data sharing—that funders mandate scholars to store and analyse data on their servers for which the funder decides what constitutes a reasonable data request (among other benefits) Other stuff covered: We return with part 2 of "overrated/underrated/appropately rated", in which James throws nouns at Dan and he responds with whether these things are overrated,...

We discuss under which circumstances retracting decades-old articles is worth the time. We also chat about why LinkenIn is underrated (yes, really) and special journal issues are overrated. A more specific list of topics and links: We play a game of "overated/underated", in which Dan has a list of stuff that he asks James whether these things are overrated or underated (or appropiated rated) Why L...

Part two of our chat with Michael Eisen (eLife Editor-in-Cheif), in which we discuss the pros and cons of collaborative peer review, journal submission interfaces, Michael's take on James' proposal that peer reviewers should be paid $450 dollars, why negative comments on peer reviews need to be normalised, plus much more. Some more details: The pros and cons of collaborative peer review (in which...

The internet should have transformed science publishing, but it didn't. We chat with Michael Eisen (Editor-in-Chief of eLife ) about reoptimizing scientific publishing and peer review for the internet age. Here what we cover and some links: How Michael co-founded PLOS The book Dan mentioned on the history of the scientific journal Why did eLife launch? What did it offer that other journals didn't?...

Dan and James discuss the pros and cons of transparent peer-review, in which peer review reports are published alongside manuscripts, as a keynote feature at the recent Munin Conference on scholarly publishing. Here's what they cover and some links: Watch the video of this episode on the Everything Hertz YouTube page What is transparent peer-review? The permanancy of open peer review reports CLOCK...