Paolo Crosetto

10-Minute Challenge: Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ (Gift Article) We’d like you to look at one piece of art for 10 minutes, uninterrupted.

Glad I did this. A reminder of why we can’t have nice things

The strain on scientific publishing Abstract. Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. The total number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science has grown exponentially in recent years; ...

If I could change one thing about #ScientificPublishing I'd ask funding bodies to stipulate all work they fund be published in non-profit journals.

The knock-on effects would alleviate most of the strain on #AcademicSky.

This isn't hard. It's big, but actually, it's pretty easy.

1/n

1/Kevin Hassett had long ago discredited himself as a scholar by parroting claims about the economy he knew to be false. Even so, parroting the lie about rigged statistics, is a new low. The academy should ostracize him the same way a fabricator of research should be ostracized.

Opinion | What to Do When the President Acts Like a Five-Year-Old?

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/o...

A great piece by Akerlof. Not only for its content, but because Akerlof writes wonderfully. In his papers, in his essays, and in his opinion pieces.

This is how you write an opinion piece. Take notes.

"Common ownership grew dramatically in the US economy from 1995 to 2021. It could raise producer profits at the expense of consumer surplus & lead to a substantial deadweight loss."

Recently accepted paper by @florianederer.bsky.social & Pellegrino:

www.restud.com/a-tale-of-tw...

#econsky
#REStud

YouTube video by CORE Econ Students taught using CORE perform better in all subjects

📈 Students taught with CORE do better in every subject.
New research from @latrobeuni.bsky.social shows CORE texts boost performance across the board. Watch Associate Professor Buly Cardak explain the findings, now published in Southern Economic Journal.
youtu.be/YxJmRriFg6A?...

Nice to see some commentary on the recent @theguardian.com piece by @iansample.bsky.social on #SciPub #AcademicPublishing #OpenAccess #ACADEMICsky

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Easily download files from the Open Science Framework with Papercheck Researchers increasingly use the Open Science Framework (OSF) to share files, such as data and code underlying scientific publications, or ...

New blog post: Easily download files from the Open Science Framework with Papercheck daniellakens.blogspot.com/2025/07/easi...

Downloading all files in an OSF project can be a hassle. Not anymore, with Papercheck! Just run:

osf_file_download("6nt4v")

Open science initiatives have gained traction in recent years. However, open peer-review practices, i.e., reforms that (i) modify the identifiability of stakeholders and (ii) establish channels for the open communication of information between stakeholders, have seen very little adoption in economics. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and desirability of such reforms. We present insights derived from survey data documenting the attitudes of 802 experimental/behavioral economists, a conceptual framework, a literature review, and cross-disciplinary data on current journal practices. On (i), most respondents support preserving anonymity for referees, but views about anonymity for authors and associate editors are mixed. On (ii), most respondents are open to publishing anonymized referee reports, sharing reports between referees, and allowing authors to appeal editorial decisions. Active reviewers, editors, and respondents from the US/Canada are generally less open to transparency reforms.

New survey of 802 experimental/behavioral economists finds:

(a) most support preserving anonymity for referees

(b) most are open to publishing anonymized referee reports

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me...

By @danieljevans.bsky.social, @adam-gill.bsky.social, et al.

Springer creates a "Discover XY" series of new journals, that copy verbatim identically titled "MDPI XY" journals, with the same business model and hiring staff from MDPI to handle all the requests, and these journals grow at triple digit rates upon release? Fell for it, *again*.

Completely agree with you.

But: feeling special as guest editor, don't realize there are 3000/year SIs in that? Fell for it.

Published in "Nature XY" to get prestige of "Nature" at lower scrutiny? Fell for it.

Use your SI to publish 10s of your own papers in it with limited scrutiny? Fell for it.

It did. With OA publishers make money by the article, and just once in the lifetime of a paper, rather than selling the same paper multiple times to subscribers.

Still, publishers took the opportunity to use every trick in the marketing book to solicit more articles & authors fell for it big time.

Brilliant article in the Guardian on the (dismal) state of scientific publishing. Great take by @hansonmark.bsky.social -- it's up to funders to fundamentally alter the rules of the game by stopping this mad and costly paper escalation.

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Quick MDPI take note, you are being left behind in the domain of Hummus research!

the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

A picture of a bottle of hummus. It is labeled NATURE HUMMUS

These NPG spinoff journals are out of control

Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

True, we are probably expecting too much of publishers.
Also true: publishers went actively in the opposite direction, *mass commissioning* articles with the special-issue model.
MDPI was first, but recently *everyone* is doing it, e.g.

the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

After morning sessions, I feel like I've heard all of this for last 10 years, but now there is more AI disruption in the mix. Exponential growth of garbage papers continues, but we are still talking about how to pay for it rather than how to stop it. Of course I've been saying that for 10 years too.

Danny Kingsley goes through several ways trad publishers have monetized progressive mandates and steered reform movements to preserve status quo. Aks that trad publishers come to table in good faith. (I think we should walk about from trad publishers, no evidence they can negotiate in good faith)

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

A language model built for the public good ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM ma...

Fully transparent and open AI coming out of Switzerland soon. Something worth monitoring. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

`tinyplot` v0.4.2 is now available on CRAN + R-universe 🎉 Mostly bug fixes, but includes some important integration improvements for Positron IDE users. Release notes: grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/NEW...

#rstats

GitHub - MilesMcBain/breakerofchains: Break your chain at the cursor line. Run the first bit. See the output. Be free. Break your chain at the cursor line. Run the first bit. See the output. Be free. - MilesMcBain/breakerofchains

breakerofchains: still the best, most underutilized RStudio addin.

This looks a must read for those interested in triple differences (DDD) designs.

It shows that the standard way many estimate DDD is wrong.

It shows why and gives you tools that work with covariates and staggered adoption.

Bonus: free R package.

arxiv.org/abs/2505.09942

Foto von Georg Henning beim Arbeiten. Dazu Texte: - Dieser sympathische junge Mann ist ab Januar '26 wieder auf dem Jobmarkt - Promotion in Psychologie an der Uni Göteborg - Erfolgreich DFG PRojekt angeworben und geleitet - suche hauptsächlich in der Wissenschaft, aber auch offen für anderes - suche mit Fokus in Berlin aber schickt mir gern auch andere spannende Ideen - Schwerpunkte: Wohlbefinden und psychische Gesundheit über die Lebensspanne, Anpassung an den Ruhestand, Persönlichkeitsentwicklung, Arbeit im Alter

Man kann's ja mal versuchen

A photo of Watterson at his drawing table.

A panel of Calvin and Hobbes riding their radio flyer red wagon.

Happy birthday to Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes! Born on July 5, 1958.

The past, present & future of UK metascience: new paper by me, @ludowaltman.bsky.social @andre-brasil.bsky.social & Ben Steyn

Published yesterday by DSIT as part of the govt’s ‘A Year in Metascience’ report

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685bcd...

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

It's a rhetorical question right?

They vote for it because they have to, as the republican Party is now run on extreme loyalty to the leader.

In authoritarian states people first comply and then privately ask the great leader for favours and exceptions.

We're going there, fast

I had them this year but it was very hard to grade them. I'm done with them too.

It's simple but not costless. To pass oral exams of a class of 150 first years, it takes more than a week (about 20min each, so 3x hour, 8 hours a day, it means 120 over 5 days). It requires time, resources, TAs, patience, and it *can* be cheated too...
All costs the Anglos did not usually face.