For some academics being asked to write a research blogpost can feel like shouting into the void, another addition to a constantly expanding mass of online content. However, the network of connections that can spring out of these engagements and their …
Author: Taster
Just how important is the problem of predatory publishing?
The phenomenon of predatory publishing is well known following the work of Jeffrey Beall and others in highlighting and popularising the issue. In a new book titled The Predator Effect, Simon Linacre draws on his experience in tackling deceptive publis…
Book Review: The Surprisingly Imprecise History of Measurement
In this cross-post, Christie Aschwanden reviews James Vincent’s Beyond Measure, The Hidden History of Measurement, finding a book which highlights the social complexity and limits to measurement, whilst at the same time opening up new ways of kno…
Requiem for a Tweet – Is there a future for the academic social capital held on the platform?
As the real possibility of platform death looms for Twitter, Mark Carrigan reflects on the role of the platform as stage for the accumulation of academic social capital and urges academics, learned societies, funders and those involved in the field of …
Sunlight not shadows: Double-anonymised peer review is not the answer to status bias
Responding to a recent paper supporting the implementation of double-anonymised peer review criteria as a means of reducing bias in favour of high profile academics, Serge P.J.M. Horbach, Tony Ross-Hellauer and Ludo Waltman, suggest open peer review ma…
To understand uses of personal data in the present, people draw on the past and imagine the future
The collection and analysis of data about us now occurs across many aspects of everyday life, but how do people come to understand these complex processes? Drawing on Living With Data research, Susan Oman, Hannah Ditchfield and Helen Kennedy show that …
How intelligent open science can inform our response to global crises
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the potential strengths and existing weaknesses of open science practices and open data sharing to addressing urgent social and technological challenges. In this post, Lucia Loffreda and Rob Johnson present a new repo…
Navigating co-design and nudge: Evidence and expertise in practice
In a previous blogpost Colette Einfeld and Emma Blomkamp argued bringing together nudges and co-design in practice illuminated fundamental differences underlying these approaches. Reflecting on a project to improve healthy food choices in a hospital se…
Academics can easily leave Twitter’s town square, but it will be much harder for their institutions
The fate of Twitter, both for academics and everyone else, has been a pressing issue in the past weeks. In this post Andy Tattersall argues that whilst individual academics could quite easily leave the platform, the centrality of Twitter to academic in…
When the safety of being right makes change hard – Introducing the Epistemic Bunker
It would be difficult to develop new ideas if everyone you associated with was hostile to them. The varying degrees of safety provided by the exclusion of people and ideas opposed to certain forms of knowledge is thus an often unacknowledged part of kn…