How to fund #research with less bias and lower costs? Use more lotteries!

"Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced cost"

nature.com/articles/s41467-025…

Give that this is only one of many such reports over the last decades, surely, this has become the standard by now? Oh, wait...

"taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself"

nature.com/articles/d41586-025…

Looks like #academia really is evidence-resistant 🫣

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

^{Schweiger, Gerald}

"We teach critical thinking for a living. It’s time we applied it to our own careers."

nature.com/articles/d41586-025…

And remember, don't donate your time and labor to for-profit publishers.

[EDIT] Access the full article via the web archive: web.archive.org/web/2026011222…

#academia

We need to talk about salaries in science

Academia too often has a ‘passion first, money second’ culture. Overcoming this mindset is crucial for building a happy career.

^{Gruda, Dritjon}

Is your lab doing code reviews? I'd like to learn from your experiences and practices!

In our teams, we're establishing internal peer-reviews of our research software. Our focus is on the correctness of our "one-off" analysis scripts that our results are based on. Because of that, the usual, patch-centered review processes don't quite work, nor does the tooling on the Git forges, as they only work for Git diffs, not the "finished" script.

Please also let me know about any practical procedures and materials that explain how to organize and document such reviews. So far, I've found stuff from the software industry, including the "IEEE Standard for Software Reviews
and Audits", but that's very abstract and not easy to translate into the context of small teams and projects like ours, in the behavioral and psychological sciences...

#academia , #software , #peerReview , #academicchatter

This morning's Graun is carrying a story about academic persecution for pro-Palestine speech in the US.

This is far from an isolated case. Nor is it solely in the US.

Listen to Amira's story about her experience at Portsmouth University.

The European Legal Support Centre is fighting cases like these across Europe. Donations are being matched until 31/12 if you want to help their work:

elsc.support/donate/

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

#FreePalestine #GlobaliseTheIntifada #Academia