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Arbitrary application of arbitrary rules

When there are rules, who decides what they are intended for and how they are applied?

Gender gaps as symptoms of patriarchy

In this post, I share some thoughts on gender gaps in academia and society more broadly.

My ongoing gender journey

I used to think I was a man’s man and heterosexual — but why? Where I grew up there was little public exposure beyond the traditional gender roles and heteronormative behaviors. As a kid, for example, I could have been convinced it was completely normal that my elementary school teacher

Committing to an Ethics Code

How can we cultivate a culture of ethical conduct? A story on one approach that may not have achieved a richer culture.

The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating

Does it really make sense to select only the best? I explore how excellence is self-defeating from a theoretical probability perspective.

The joy of compounding skillsets

Being a generalist makes you more unique then you think!

"Stories from my PhD" series

As a recovered academic, I feel comfortable writing some stories I have not shared before.

Remarks for the Berlin Publishing Conference 2023

My remarks for the junior researcher panel at the APE2023 conference.

Open Inaccessibility

In my decade working on the openness of research I touched upon content accessibility only a few times, in part because it was and is a less discussed topic in my circles. But that does not make it less important. After all: When a PDF is downloaded, who can read

Dipping my toes into 3D

This week I am a bit at a loss what to write about - I had drafts on the weaponization of meta-research, how to write an R package in 2022 (but the year's almost out), the consequences of owning your digital infrastructure. But none of it really fell into place

Private open scholarship

A primary argument around open scholarship (i.e., open science) is that of “publicly funded means publicly accessible.” I don’t like that argument because it reinforces the inverse: Privately funded means privately accessible.

Constructive selfishness

In my reflections on the Shuttleworth Fellowship (forthcoming), I realised that I was given the gift of "constructive selfishness." The gist is: If you make things work for you, you can make things work for others as well. Constructive selfishness includes others and means that by focusing on what you

Snaps of November (2022)

I bought a new secondhand camera to kickstart my long-lost hobby from my adolescent days this month. I wanted to share some snaps here.

Creative Fridays

After my summer vacation, I decided I was going to take Fridays off. For the past six weeks I have taken Creative Fridays.

Thoughts on Mastodon (part 1?)

The Twitter shitshow re-taught me a valuable lesson: All institutions we have come to rely on can be burnt down in just a few weeks. That means their maintenance requires effort and not changing things also takes effort. I know this reenergises me about my work on changing science: Science

The future of syndicated access

We could use distributed access to prevent surveillance practices from spreading into scholarly publishing further.

What to do with that invitation?

Here’s a few questions I’d like to know the answers to if you’re inviting me to speak somewhere.

Direct action now

You have probably seen the news: People gluing themselves in the proximity of valuable paintings behind glass (Van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer). Or the news of people spraying paint on luxury car dealerships, intelligence services, central banks, and gluing themselves on top of late-night talkshow tables. If not, now you know

10 posts for 10 weeks

I always love how things can come back to bite you in the ass - I shared this on LinkedIn a while ago: I’ve been writing more blog posts lately about my professional journey. By now, it's been another two months and it's been pretty quiet on here. To

Metadata on collective authorship

While working on ResearchEquals, I have a lot of ideas that could be worthwhile for research practice. I say I have a lot of ideas and most don’t make the cut into production for a ton of reasons (a topic for another time). What does happen with ideas is

Self-hosting vs paid hosting

I migrated my blog from a self-hosted Ghost server to the hosted service provided by Ghost - and it’s a relief to be honest. I have always enjoyed administrating things myself. I hate it when I can’t (👀 at you organizational IT departments). Privately, I would consider myself an

A year at JOSS in review

It’s already been a year since I announced I was starting as an editor at JOSS! 🤯 I am still smug about being on their about page: In all seriousness though, I’ve learned a lot since I started editing. I’d never been an editor at a journal, and

Perpetually imminent launches

It’s not uncommon for academics to have ideas - in fact it’s what they’re paid for. Sometimes it feels like that's where they stall too. With the push to reform science, academics have been funnelling those ideas towards improving science. More minds, more insights - perfect! Some

Why I schedule my emails

Emails can be a neverending to do list. In a way, it's like housework: There's always something to do and it's undervalued. Don't get me wrong - I love email because it's a to do list too. But sometimes it gets the better of me. I spend my mornings going

Editing for Upstream

I've been invited to join the Upstream blog's editorial team – I am happy to announce that from now on I'll be working with Ginny Hendricks, Christine Ferguson, Martin Fenner, and John Chodacki to bring new content on the blog. Launched in February 2022, the blog's purpose is as a new

"Data upon request" no longer ethical?

A recent paper in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology indicates that researchers in their sample who indicate data is available upon request actually fail to comply with data requests in 93%. This seemed to make a great impression on Twitter, with over 3,000 retweets and 15,000 likes (at

Unarchived research - the case of ScienceMatters

One of the key functions of a scholarly publishing system is archiving the work - something that doesn't happen without effort. One of the documents I like to reference for archival strategy is that by National Digital Stewardship Alliance - it goes from hot archival (easily retrievable but more costly)

A future fieldworker

While she previously would note data about the behavior of her grackles in a notebook and transcribe them on the computer, she now whipped out her phone. Armed with the most advanced research device she'd ever been able to privately buy, she starts filling out a quick form. "Allow GPS,

Imagining a future in research

This was my prepared fictional story for a session at the Abraham Kuyper Summer Seminar on Research Integrity Fifteen years from today, wednesday August 27th, 2036. The academic year starts next week. It is a year the northern hemisphere burned in summer and the southern hemisphere burned in winter. People

Constructing business as a research theory

As an ex-academic, I've learned many things that do not transfer to outside academia. Sometimes it is a simple mismatch of knowledge, other times it is an idea of understanding that completely misses the mark. Sometimes it's me getting in the way of myself and being an ex-academic has nothing

Editor for JOSS

I am pleased to announce that I am starting as an editor for the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) (as of August 1st, 2021). Despite my motto "journals won't solve the problems journals cause", JOSS is doing one of the best jobs possible within this space. Free to publish,

Pet peeves of peer review

I've been doing peer reviews for about six years and for some reason have been invited to do a bunch more recently. During the Munin conference keynote by Dan Quintana and James Heathers on peer review, some of my pet peeves of peer review came to mind. These are by

Illegitimate publication

Without my knowledge or approval, an original publication appeared online on Oct 10, 2020 with the title "p-Values Less Than 0.05 in Psychology: What is Going on?"

Reflections on my PhD and building sustainable science

This is the prepared introduction to my livestreamed PhD defense of 17.04.2020. The dissertation, “Contributions towards understanding and building sustainable science” can be found on ThesisCommons.

Internet Filtering is Obsolete in a Decentralized Web

This is a cross-post from Medium. We live in a centralized Web regulated by fragmented legislation across countries. As a consequence, if I build a Web platform in the Netherlands, I need to take into account whether the content served on the platform is legal in Germany (replace with any

OK Google: Delete My Account (No Wait. No Really.)

This post is a cross-post from Medium. I used to be an avid Google user. Everything I did was Google and I got really attached to my e-mail address after so many years of use: c.hartgerink@gmail.com. I fear some remnants of my data linger in the Googliverse,

Concerns About Blockchain for Science

This is a cross-post from Medium. I know, I know: I wrote about blockchain for science just last summer — this blog will explain why I now consider implementing blockchain to “improve” science a mistake. I am sharing why I changed my mind because the narrative is increasingly concerning me: The

Wetenschap is meer dan een product, de promovendus meer dan een middel

"One finds limits by pushing them" - Herbert Simon Iedere ochtend dat ik op Tilburg University aankom, zie ik bovenstaand citaat. Een mooi citaat, waarschijnlijk bedoeld om de medewerker te inspireren. In mijn ervaring blijkt het veelal schijn die het beeld van de universiteit als voorstrijder van de academische vrijheid

Copyright and Licenses in Open Access Publishing

This is a cross-post from Medium. tl;dr copyright restricts knowledge sharing and by extension production; the author can decide to empower knowledge sharing and production with specific Creative Commons licenses (i.e., only CC 0 or CC BY) If you came here purely for a clarification of Creative Commons

False claims of copyright and STM

Recently, I have become interested in the issue of false claims of copyright (i.e., copyfraud) in publishing. I just wrote to the publisher’s association (STM) to ask them what their perspective is on copyfraud is and whether they condone such behavior by their member associations. Read my letter

Elsevier stopped me doing my research

This is a cross-post from the original, previously available on the Open Notebook Science Network. I am a statistician interested in detecting potentially problematic research such as data fabrication, which results in unreliable findings and can harm policy-making, confound funding decisions, and hampers research progress. To this end, I am