Rima-Maria Rahal

Our data suggest:
💁🏻‍♀️ Less gender bias: more female-led submissions and funded projects
💸 Lower costs compared to preparing and reviewing full proposals for all submissions
✨ Satisfaction among applicants and reviewers comparable to a conventional funding allocation process

What happens when a lottery determines which proposals for third-party funding get reviewed?

Details here (#OpenAccess and fresh off the press): doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Thinking about applying for GYA membership but still have questions?
Then join us 22 August from 13:00 – 14:30 UTC for an informational webinar featuring GYA members and Executive Committee members!
Register here: leopoldina-org.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
More info and QR registration 👇👇👇

Ten simple rules for being a co-author on a many-author non-empirical paper Many-author non-empirical papers include “how to” articles, recommendations or consensus statements, roadmaps for future research, catalogs of ideas, or calls to action. These papers benefit the resea...

And if you're one of the coauthors, here are additional recommendations for what you can do to make the collab a bliss: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Thanks to @tweissgerber.bsky.social, Natascha Drude, Anita Bandrowski, and Friederike Kohrs for making this project happen 🥳

I love 𝐁𝐢𝐠 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 projects, bringing together many minds to tackle a questions together 🙏 But leading a project with many coauthors also comes with a particular set of ✨challenges✨. Here are our recommendations for taking the lead for a many-authored publication: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Chris Hartgerink and Frederik Schulze Spüntrup, thanks for writing this piece with me!

✨ Leaner procedures could lower entry biases and reviewer load.
✨ We need more research on research funding - and evidence-based science policy that preserves academic freedom.

✨ We discuss biases and misperceptions in funding decisions.
✨ We argue that decision makers should heed existing research about reducing bias in decision making processes.

Gute Forschungs-Förderung braucht Erforschung! Peer-Review-Verfahren kommen immer wieder zu suboptimalen, verzerrten Entscheidungen. Wie lässt sich die Vergabe von Forschungsmitteln verbessern?

Just published in Forschung & Lehre: Our take on 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐨 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫. Given current international developments restricting academic freedom through grant reallocations, we use this opportunity to speak up for 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬.

🔗 www.forschung-und-lehre.de/forschung/gu...

Thanks to Frederik Schulze Spüntrup for doing this project with me and to Hans Sauer Stiftung for supporting us with a grant that made this large-scale data collection possible in the first place.

Effects differed across cultures, but we found no systematic explanation for why they did (yet!).

These preferences also conditioned whether decision makers would look up others' team membership or preferred not to know if they played with an in- or outgroup member. They discriminated more if they wanted to know the other players' team membership.

✨And what about cognition?✨ Individual preferences for helping others (vs. helping oneself) made a difference for how much effort (decision time, fixations) decision makers needed to inform their choices.

✨What about discrimination?✨ We found discrimination in favor of the ingroup in every country studied. How strongly people discriminated differed between countries: Where societal uncertainty is high, people discriminated more.

While they decided, we observed their gaze using webcam-based eye-tracking. Because we collected data online and used webcams, we could reach participants from 20 countries

✨So what's the research, exactly?✨ We divided participants into teams and then asked them to make decisions about sharing money between themselves and either members of their own team (ingroup) or the other team (outgroup).

We show that people decide differently whether they want to help, depending on personal and cultural characteristics. To encourage them to help, this means different strategies could be needed for different decision makers.

✨Why should you care?✨ Many large-scale problems societies face require cooperation across social groups, across teams or across countries. Think: climate change, public health, social inequality.

✨tl;dr✨ People seem to 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 between members of their own team and others when it comes to deciding whether to help them. Both inter-individual and intercultural differences matter.

Now published: Our paper investigating cognitive processes of ingroup favoritism across 20 countries. Free to read (hashtag#OpenAccess) at www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2417456122

We’re beyond honored to receive the SIPS Mission Award 🏆 & thrilled to have received 5 SIPS Commendations 🏆 for projects across our 4 core pillars: Metascience, Social Justice & DEIA, Community, and Education in OS.

We are so grateful to all contributors who made this possible 💜

[All links below]

Danke euch für die super nette Woche 🥰

In Deutschland wird leidenschaftlich über mögliche Änderungen an den Strukturen der wissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit diskutiert. Das Ziel ist, die vielfältigen Verführungen zum Machtmissbrauch, die das gegenwärtige deutsche System beinhaltet, stärker zu beschränken.

Diese Woche kuratiere ich den Account von Real Scientists Deutschland @realscientists.de. Die Idee: zeigen, wer und was bei Wissenschaft dahinter steckt.

Wenn ihr Lust habt, über meine Arbeit und meinen Alltag zu lesen, schaut vorbei ⬇️

My take (tl;dr): We need change that goes deeper than establishing new publication outlets -- we need to change what a ➡ good publication ⬅ means.

Check out the webinar here: youtu.be/YiBV2gQGinI?...

💎 Diamond 💎 #OpenAccess (no fee to read, no fee to publish) is sparking hope for solving parts of the dilemma of sharing research without feeding for-profit publishers. In a PLOS webinar, we discussed if and how we might ✨ achieve the impossible (?) ✨ of making change towards Diamond OA.

🍀10:30 pm CEST The Costs of Competition (Gerald Schweiger)
🍀 11.45 am CEST Are large language models useful to support post-publication peer review? First empirical results of a research in progress study (Lutz Bornmann)

Workshop poster More than Luck

🍀#morethanluck Rethinking Research Funding
Making a splash: What are challenges involved with changing the way research is funded? Join via zoom 🔗https://bit.ly/fundingluck

⬇️ Program for Today ⬇️

🍀1:30 pm CEST Partial Randomization: Lessons Learnt (Ulrike Bischler)
🍀3:30 pm CEST Research Assessment at the DFG – Practices, Philosophy, and Outlook (Tobias Grimm)
🍀5:00 pm CEST The implications of societal inequality for research funding organization (Onur Şahin)

🍀 9am CEST Research Funding in Germany: The Role of Project Management Organizations and Future Perspectives (Esther Ostermeier)
🍀10:30am CEST Evaluating novel and high-risk high-reward research (Chiara Franzoni)