Vincent Traag

🌍 Become a Founding Sponsor of #IRSC26

Sponsorship opportunities are live for the inaugural International Research Software Conference (7-8 Sept 2026, Sheffield + online), co-located with #RSECon26.

www.researchsoft.org/irsc/sponsor...

tinyurl.com/IRSCupdates

#ResearchSoftware #OpenScience

Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions We demonstrate that graph-based models are fully capable of representing higher-order interactions, and have a long history of being used for precisely this purpose. This stands in contrast to a commo...

New on the arxiv:

“Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions”

arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937

We clarify central misconceptions in the recent literature on "higher-order networks".

w/ @piratepeel.bsky.social , @manlius.bsky.social, and @thilogross.bsky.social

Explainer 🧵: 1/N

We moeten ons niet langer laten gijzelen door parasitaire techbazen In plaats van extreem afhankelijk te blijven van monopolistische techgiganten moet de universiteit durven te investeren in digitale autonomie, betoogt Karwan Fatah-Black. Steek al het geld van Microso...

www.mareonline.nl/opinie/we-mo...

If you have two measures of the same confounder, you can just include both of them in your regression model Corrigendum: There was an embarrassing mistake in the SEM part of the original version of this blog post which has now been fixed. Many thanks to David Kenny for catching it! Scroll to the very end if...

Also, if you're worried about collinearity between your confounders -- that should not be your major concern here:
www.the100.ci/2025/10/13/i...

Knowing the ocean means living with uncertainty As sea levels rise and climate change speeds up, knowledge about the ocean becomes increasingly important. But how is this knowledge being created and how can we use it best to prepare for the future?...

🌊 How is our knowledge of the oceans being created? To answer this question, Jackie Ashkin, PhD candidate at CWTS, studies the work of ocean scientists from up close. In this news item, she tells us more and shares surprising insights from ocean science.

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2026...

Sharing the load: Building a collective to support open research information online Can we share resources and burdens to make available key open research information resources in actionable and connectable form in the cloud? Through sharing processes and systems, is it possible, ove...

Today we launch ORION: a coordinated initiative to make open research information more inclusive, accessible and democratic. Our experience with GoogleBigQuery support collaborative and community solutions for ORI infrastructures, increasing sustainability & resilience.
doi.org/10.54900/2pn...

Check out our new, open access paper in RSSM. Anne Maaike Mulders expertly led our author team (with Christoph Janietz Jochem Tolsma myself) to find an important piece of the gender inequity puzzle in academia.

🔬Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📰Press release: www.ru.nl/onderzoek/on...

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

CU signs $2M OpenAI deal for ChatGPT access Students and faculty will gain access to ChatGPT Edu starting in March under a three-year deal.

My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity

www.axios.com/local/boulde...

Visualizing Science Using VOSviewer VOSviewer, developed at Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), is a highly popular software tool for mapping and visualizing science. The course Visualizing Science Usin...

🚀 The next edition of our VOSviewer course is coming up! Are you planning to join?

📅 16 June – 18 June 2026
🕑 13.30 to 17.30 CET

🔗 More information and registration: 👉 www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/courses/s...

@neesjanvaneck @LudoWaltman

A variation: Scientists who claim they’re “not interested in causality” because they assume the term only applies to deterministic, law-like relationships that are unrealistic in their field. Instead, they’re interested in how “X drives Y”, the effects of X, the “extent to which X matters for Y”>

Doing open research is more than just knowing how. Changing research culture and sustaining open infrastructures are crucial too. Presenter: Dr Kathleen Gregory from Leiden University. As a social science researcher working in scholarly and science communication, Kathleen’s research focuses on scholarly...

Kathleen Gregory will deliver the closing keynote at Open Research Week 2026, titled 'Doing open research is more than just knowing how. Changing research culture and sustaining open infrastructures are crucial too.'

🗓 Fri 6 March 2026 |⏰11.00–12.00 CET
🔗 Register: libcal.essex.ac.uk/event/4465365

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

🚨Job alert 🚨

I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.

If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.

📤 Please share widely!

www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

Introducing Causion: A web app for playing with DAGs | Peder M. Isager Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published:
doi.org/10.1162/QSS....

@tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

Atentos, 2 contratos de 2 años para egresados!!

Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main!

www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...

Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users—in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. Currently, we a...

📣 In our next research seminar, our colleague @altibel.bsky.social will give a presentation titled 'Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia'.

🎧 Make sure to join!

📅 Friday this week, 6/2/2025 | 3:00-4:15 PM (CET)
📌 Online

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/20...

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.”

Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

I'm at the Willard Hotel where I've been denied entry and kicked out of the Reclaiming Science event with NIH director Bhattacharya & other top agency leaders.

@jocelynkaiser.bsky.social and I registered for the event months ago yet were told capacity was full, even as they let in dozens of others.

🎓 Last week, Dr. Juan Pablo Bascur successfully defended his PhD thesis at Leiden University titled 'Science maps for information retrieval’.
Congratulations on this fantastic achievement! ✨
💡Read more about Juan Pablo's research 👉 www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2026...
@leidensocial.bsky.social

Looking forward to having Andy Stirling at CWTS!

Professor Andy Stirling joins CWTS as Visiting Professor CWTS is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Andy Stirling as Visiting Professor.

📢 We are pleased to announce the appointment of Andy Stirling as Visiting Professor! 🎓

He will support CWTS in shaping change in contemporary science systems, including research assessment, governance reform, and inclusive knowledge production. 🤝

👉 www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2026...

📄 New paper by @tklebel.bsky.social and our colleague @vtraag.bsky.social: 'Introduction to structural causal models in science studies'. Find out more in the thread below!

direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

#medlibs #publichealth

This is an interesting development...

Thanks, that's nice to hear! Hope you enjoy our introduction as much as we enjoyed reading your work in this area (although most stuff in our intro should be familiar to you already).

Super excited to see that somebody finally wrote about this 🥳

If you do research about research, you really need causal thinking (just like when you do research about anything else really).

looking at academic bsky, one might get the opposite idea, but out in the wild, many researchers have never heard of or worried about formal causal inference, and they get bewildered to hear that perhaps they shouldn't just freely use causal language when interpreting their correlational results.

As a sidenote: the article was also a great (and in many instances tedious) exercise in writing a fully reproducible manuscript. I think it was worth it, but definitely led to some headache and frustration (especially since we wanted the result to look pretty).