Global metascience seminar monitor

The 30th Annual STI-ENID Conference centres on "Indicators for a Responsible Research Future" — how science and technology indicators can promote responsible research and innovation, with attention to diversity, inclusivity, openness, and sustainability in research assessment.

Hosted by the ECOOM teams at KU Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the University of Antwerp.

This event is an ONLINE satellite event of RSECon26, organised by DRA and UKRN.

RSEs operate in a research ecosystem where the research process is rapidly becoming more open and reproducible.

This event will deliver three components:

1. A practical introduction to ongoing and emerging innovations (e.g., open publishing, data sharing, reproducible computation, code check), drawing on The Carpentries’ "7 Steps towards Reproducible Research" materials; 2. Pedagogical guidance on how to effectively train colleagues and support adoption of these practices, plus a discussion session on challenges and opportunities for convincing peers to engage; 3. A co-creation session to create a customised version of these materials focusing on the priorities most relevant to RSEs.

The training will be led by Danny Garside, DRA trainer and community manager, who brings experience presenting this material in train-the-trainer contexts with UKRN. The session will also draw lessons learnt from DRA's delivery of the OSPARK Bootcamp - a program which equips Open Science advocates with communication and outreach skills.

The registration fee for this training is 130 GBP.

Spaces are limited and available on a first come, first served basis. (https://events.digital-research.academy/event/134/)

Metascience uses a scientific approach to understand and improve the scientific approach! In this presentation, I question some common assumptions in modern metascience. For example, I question whether exploratory research is more 'tentative' than confirmatory research and whether questionable research practices such as HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known) and undisclosed multiple testing are problematic. I discuss these and other metascience assumptions and argue that they may not be as problematic as commonly assumed.

Valid measurement is critical for empirical research. Yet a growing body of literature suggests that validation practices in the social and psychological sciences are often highly inadequate, with measures routinely failing to capture the constructs they are intended to assess. This talk reviews current validation practices and proposes paths to better measurement.

Anne-Sophie Schaltegger (ETH Zürich) — "A social and cultural perspective on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research assessment: learning from three Swiss funding schemes"

Research assessment mechanisms are still considered one of the main barriers to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (IDR/TDR). Particularly in the funding domain, criteria and processes used to evaluate the quality of IDR/TDR proposals, or to monitor the progress of funded IDR/TDR projects, create biases against collaborative, boundary-spanning research. To be able to develop adequate solutions, more knowledge is needed about the current lived realities and experiences of actors involved in IDR/TDR assessment: panel members, funding officers, and the researchers themselves. In this seminar, I present insights from my ethnographic study of ten assessment panels and implicated funding officers and researchers in three Swiss IDR/TDR funding schemes. I will outline three main findings: 1) the need to acknowledge and leverage – rather than to reduce – the conceptual and epistemic diversity in assessment panels, 2) the potential of scaffolding IDR/TDR assessment as a relational, social process, and 3) the opportunity of using assessment itself as a resource for all involved actors in the challenging endeavour of making IDR/TDR happen successfully.

Hussein Zeidan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) — "From slogan to practice: Restoring transdisciplinarity as a serious way of working"

Transdisciplinarity is increasingly celebrated as a pathway to better science, yet its growing visibility masks persistent conceptual ambiguity and a widening gap between rhetoric and practice. While publications often present it in optimistic terms, the real frustrations surface informally, in the hallway conversations where scholars acknowledge the tensions, contradictions, and institutional pressures shaping their work. In this contribution, I surface these underlying tensions and question how Pop-Transdisciplinarity have taken hold. I invite us to reconsider what we expect transdisciplinarity to achieve, how it operates in practice, and how it intersects with other approaches to societal and epistemic challenges. I aim to move beyond superficial claims toward a more honest, ethically grounded, and rigorous engagement, one that confronts transdisciplinarity's blind spots and situates it within broader debates on knowledge, power, and the moral responsibilities of science.

UK Reproducibility Network's inaugural conference! Convening the research community, drive broader collaboration, and to solidify UKRN’s long-term sustainability plan, the UKRN conference will showcase impact of its core initiatives and engage the research sector community as change agents to improve UK research #UKRN2026JoinUs (https://www.conference.ukrn.org/)

Research assessment shapes not only careers and funding decisions but also the culture of research itself. However, many current assessment systems, based on publication metrics or the expectations of linear career trajectories, were never intentionally designed, and therefore often fail to value what truly contributes to rigorous, innovative, and socially valuable research. This webinar shows how research on research can inform better funding decision-making. I will share real-world examples from my work as a statistician at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and my current research on funding and evaluation.

(https://www.aimos2026.org/)

ICSSI 2026 is an interdisciplinary event that brings together experts from various fields to explore the dynamics of scientific research and innovation. The gathering facilitates dialogue between researchers from academia and industry alongside policymakers, publishers, funders, and administrators. The conference emphasises science and technology policy environments, opportunities, and challenges around the world, aiming to strengthen the worldwide significance and influence of research in this field.

The 2026 themes are: 1. The Future of Science Policy — how research can support a stronger social framework for science. 2. The Future Infrastructure of the Scientific Ecosystem — new technologies and models reshaping how scientists collaborate, publish, and make discoveries. 3. The Scientific Workforce — shifting skill requirements, representation, and professional development in science's international talent ecosystem.

Institutionally organized research funding emerged in the early 20th century, with significant expansion during and after World War II in the US. This sparked the adoption of project-based peer-reviewed research funding across Western systems, though at varying rates. Current criticisms focus on fairness issues, high costs, and questionable validity.

The seminar discusses emerging alternatives, including lottery-based approaches. While random funding distribution faces skepticism, tiebreaker lotteries among peer-reviewed proposals have gained more acceptance. The speaker proposes a lottery-first approach, in which a lottery determines who is eligible to submit a full proposal, presenting empirical data on fairness, costs, and satisfaction.

The talk concludes by examining why funding systems resist change despite criticisms and what functions beyond merit selection may explain this persistence.

Taking inspiration from guerrilla warfare, I will introduce a framework for managing scientific research that addresses the complexity of research while advancing goals of transparency and reliability. Real science is complex, and there is no single scientific method. It is a chaotic network of theories, data, models, graphs, comparisons, summaries, and narratives. A flaw in any part can ruin everything.

How can small teams of researchers challenge this complexity and emerge victorious? More statistical training is not enough. More resources is not enough. Lawrence of Arabia once said, "Guerrilla warfare is more intellectual than a bayonet charge." And this is how we too will proceed.

Instead of confronting the complexity directly, with more money and more people and more data and more meta-analyses, we must develop a SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOW that subdivides, analyses, and transparently justifies our individual research projects. The tools to do this already exist, and individual researchers can become scientific guerrillas today to improve their chances of victory.

discussing the interesting paper of Felipe Romero on philosophy of science and the replicability crisis.

discussing the 2021 paper by Hoekstra and Vazire, Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science.

The gathering brought together researchers from across disciplines to explore barriers to collaboration and foster new connections. The afternoon was followed by a morning workshop designed to strengthen interdisciplinary collaborations across policy, research, and commercialisation.