Last week I attended a conference organized by the university libraries in the Netherlands with the straightforward title: “What do we want from publishers?” The conference served as a consultation with librarians and other academics, before the universities in the Netherlands start negotiations about deals with commercial publishers such as Elsevier.
Surprisingly little – at least to my taste. Science is supposed to be cumulative: we should build knowledge on solid foundations. But how do we know what knowledge is solid? Through independent verification. If someone claims to have found a regularity, it is only through repeated testing of the same claim that we know that the result holds in other populations and contexts. It turns out that scientists rarely conduct such replications.
Scientific research is based on data. How should researchers treat and document the data they analyze? Research Data Management policies recommend that data should be “as open as possible, and as closed as necessary”. What does that mean in practice? Only publish data you are allowed to publish . The “as open as possible” principle certainly does not mean that researchers should make all data they have public.
Gotcha. Or did the clickbait title not get you here? Regardless, I will try not to disappoint you. But before we get to the promised list, here’s why it is important. The nightmare of every business: suddenly a new competitor emerges, wiping out their entire firm’s market share. When ChatGPT was released a little over a year ago, it was clear that it posed a threat to the business model of schools and universities.
Wat kunnen we na de verkiezingen van november 2023 verwachten voor de universiteiten? In de partijprogramma’s voor de komende verkiezingen komen twee punten bij veel partijen terug: studiemigratie, en de financiering van het hoger onderwijs. Bij sommige partijen zien we ook ideeën over de financiering van wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Het eerste punt is het aantal studenten uit het buitenland dat in Nederland studeert.
René Bekkers, October 10, 2023. An MS Word version of this post is here. At the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, research integrity is governed by seven policies: The overarching policy is the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity adopted by the Royal Academy of Arts &
In the social sciences it is increasingly common to preregister hypotheses, research designs and analysis plans before a study is conducted (Ferguson et al., 2023). Because the time-stamp on the preregistration documents when the ideas for the study were deposited, a preregistration is an intellectual honesty device.
To what extent does the accumulation of wealth reduce feelings of responsibility for society and behavioral manifestations of generosity, such as charitable giving and bequeathing? Since 2003, the level of generosity of the Dutch population, defined as the proportion of resources donated to charitable causes, has declined by about 40% (Bekkers, Gouwenberg, Koolen-Maas &
It’s one of those days – at 13.25 I have not yet worked on any of the main tasks I envisioned for myself. Where did all the time go this morning? I do know that I handled a lot of messages I received through e-mail. I can even feel a little satisfaction about having cleared away the clutter in my inbox.
If you’re using the Qualtrics platform to collect data, in most cases you will not need the exact IP address or geolocation data such as longitude and latitude coordinates. As a rule, you don’t want to collect personal information that you do not need. But did you know that the default setting on the platform is to collect this type of information nonetheless?
The distinction between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ sub-communities aligns with the self-identities of many researchers in the social sciences. In my experience advocating for open science in multi-method environments these identities create polarization.
