Olmo van den Akker

I am absolutely delighted to announce that the open access version of "In Referees We Trust? How Peer Review Became a Mark of Scientific Legitimacy" is now live! Want to know more about how scholars' lives came to be ruled by Reviewer 2? Download the book FREE at: direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...

Another special issue at Psych Science! We invite “submissions that advance the field through critical appraisal of articles previously published by Psychological Science” Please share! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Preregistration Authors see benefits but "concerns persist regarding limited perceived added value (e.g., unnecessary bureaucratization, increased workload), unintended side-effects (increased costs, discouragement of exploratory work), and reduced analytical flexibility." doi.org/10.1186/s410...

Big news at the META/e conference: metacheck, a promising tool for automatically extracting information from scientific manuscripts is beta-launched today. Has the potential to massively increase the efficiency of meta-science projects. www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/

@crist14n.bsky.social presented some of the capabilities of metacheck, which has its first beta release today! See an example report that demonstrates all of the current modules. www.scienceverse.org/metacheck/re...

Our paper "An analysis of functional relationships between systemic conditions and unethical behavior in German academia" has just been published in Meta-Psychology: open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

#EMSP2026 “Patient registries must reflect patients’ preferences — it all comes down to trust.” A powerful takeaway from @denolmo.bsky.social at the #EMSP2026 Conference. Watch the livestream- eu-admin.eventscloud.com/website/1909...

The governing body for 14 Dutch universities (UNL) has published a "Vision on Publication Culture" that is so inspiring and forward thinking. Worth a read for those trying to changes publishing and research assessment practices. Take a read: www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/files/public...

Come join this project to study a form of peer review that focuses on the methods instead of the results. I'm already a postdoc on the team so hit me up if you have any questions!

📝 Latest Article Alert! 📝 "Rethinking (un)blinding in biomedical proposal peer review: A multi-stakeholder qualitative study" Seba Qussini, Farizah Mezer Anami & Kris Dierickx → doi.org/10.1080/0898... #PeerReview #AcademicPublishing #MedicalScience #BioMedicine

Should we use error checking tools like Statcheck and GRIM to automatically check for errors in studies in meta-analyses? I wrote a blog post with some insights from a hackathon where we scrutinized this idea. metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/3/...

📢 New from PYMS! We're launching online lunch meetings. A chance to present your work to other metascience ECRs Share your work in any form: finished projects, preliminary results, a trial-run conference presentation, or ideas you'd love feedback on Want to present? Sign up using the form!

On 24 April, I will speak at the @emspofficial.bsky.social conference about making studies using patient registry data more transparent. It means a lot to me because a close friend was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis just last year. Hope to learn a lot there! #EMSP2026

You still have time to sign up for the upcoming workshop of PMGS. @denolmo.bsky.social will guide you through evaluating and writing high quality preregistration. See more and sign up here: paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/pr...

I wrote a blog for the Meta-Research Center expressing my infinite frustration about not getting data. What else is new, you might think? Well, I added an extra layer of annoyance directed at the journals who do NOTHING to enforce promised data sharing. metaresearch.nl/blog/2026/2/...

Now available on the OSF as part of a growing collection of preregistration resources, the new EEG & ERP Methods template guides researchers through every stage of ERP study planning. In our Q&A, two of its creators share how the template can help researchers at all stages:

“If fabricated studies make their way into the evidence base, they can mislead real scientists and ultimately slow progress for patients." Published in The BMJ, a new AI tool developed by @aidybarnett.bsky.social and colleagues has exposed the scale of fake studies flooding cancer research.

#OA articles are cited more, help citizen scientists learn more about the topic they've helped on, but there’s little strong evidence they have other long-lasting effects on research, or many economic and social benefits www.science.org/content/arti... @jeffreybrainard.bsky.social @science.org

Proposal to use more nicknames when talking about scientific researchers, the fun of which is nicely illustrated by James "cheaters' bane" Heathers in his acknowledgement slide. #AIMOS2025 @jamesheathers.bsky.social

Slide by Lisa Bero on commercial funding of research. No further comment necessary, I think. #AIMOS2025

What is the best reporting guideline acronym? ROB-ME by @mjpages.bsky.social gets my preliminary vote. Any other good ones, #AIMOS2025?

🔓 It's great to see authors sharing their experiences with publishing on MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) — our open review platform for metascience using the publish–review–curate model: www.openscience.nl/en/cases/the...

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

New peer review dataset incoming! Involves authors, topic area, editorial decision, author characteristics (institutional prestige, region, gender), BoRE evaluations, review characteristics (length, sentiment, z-score, reviewer gender). (Talk by Aaron Clauset) #PRC10

Christos Kotanidis checked differences in abstracts between submissions and published papers & assessed whether these differences indicated higher or lower research quality. Abstracts typically improved, especially in big five medical journals. Evidence for the effectiveness of peer review? #PRC10

Andrea Corvillon on distributed vs. panel peer review at the ALMA Observatory: Most experienced PIs no longer have the best ranks in a distributed review system, but why that is remains unclear. #PRC10

Interesting to see that the conference review process (and publishing norms) are do different in the field of computer science compared to other fields. How do these differences come about? Fundamental differences between fields or chance and inertia? #PRC10

Di Girolamo explains why the use of the phrase "to our knowledge" lacks reproducibility and accountability. Good trigger to make an edit in a grant proposal I'm writing. #PRC10

Leslie McIntosh: Markers of (dis)trust in science: Pay attention to email addresses (use of hotmail.com and underscores) and institutional affiliations (new and unknown organizations without verifiable addresses) #PRC10

How do paper mills operate? I always thought they were in cahoots with illegitimate journals but apparently they target normal journals as well, with the editors of those journals playing no role. (Talk by Tim Kersjes from Springer Nature) Could open review reports solve this issue? #PRC10