Sören Krach

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

Intriguing study…!
www.nature.com/articles/s41... /cc @rorinstitute.bsky.social

These are the types of changes needed at funding agencies.

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

Leaders at @ukri.org should be seriously looking at the lottery first idea. 68% lower economic costs, increase in diversity of award holders and well received.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People like it as much or better than conventional review, it takes less cost/effort of reviewers, is more equitable, reduced burden on applicants/institutions, easier process for funder to manage, etc. etc.

Was a preprint, now a paper. Our experiment on researchers preferences for published papers. Disappointingly, the journal impact factor still dominates, and even worse, some authors are willing to sacrifice their results for a higher impact factor. www.scienceopen.com/hosted-docum...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

🔥 A lottery-first system 🎲 makes research grants allocation cheaper, faster, and boosts funding for women, while "traditional" (patriarcal?) peer review drags everyone down.

🤔 Maybe randomness is fairer than the experts.

🔄 Time to rethink the whole game! 💣

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

'The new procedure required applicants to submit only an expression of interest...before 500 were selected, via lottery, to submit a full proposal for peer review....the number of female applicants increased 10 per cent, while the number of funded projects by women rose by 23 per cent.' 2/2

Adding lottery to funding process ‘improves women’s success rates’ Lottery-first approach can increase applications and success rate of ‘structurally disadvantaged’ researchers, study finds

Adding lottery to funding process ‘improves women’s success rates’ www.timeshighereducation.com/news/adding-... via @timeshighered

Screenshot Newsletter: Studie zeigt, dass ein vorgeschaltetes Losverfahren bei Drittmittelverfahren Kosten spart und zu mehr Förderung von Frauen führen würde.

Das einzige Problem, das ich sehe: Mit etwas Pech kann man nie überhaupt was einreichen (geht mir zB seit Jahren bei Freiraum so).
Eine Verschiebung von Drittmitteln zu Grundfinanzierung müsste imho damit einhergehen.

(Quelle: Aktueller Zeit Wissen Newsletter)

Losverfahren zahlt sich aus - Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre Forschung zeigt: Vorgeschaltetes Losverfahren bei der Drittmittelvergabe spart erheblich Zeit und Ressourcen.

Interesse an Losverfahren besteht weiter. @soerenkrach.bsky.social & @finnluebber.bsky.social über "Freiraum" Förderung der Stftg Innovation in der Hochschullehre
"frühe Lotterie [...] schafft fairere und voraussetzungsärmere Startbedingungen für alle."
stiftung-hochschullehre.de/blog/losverf...

ZPID Trier: Junior professorship (W1-equivalent) Psychological Metascience (with tenure-track to W2 LBesG-equivalent) (f/m/d) leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/job/10kku5n7 #Stellenangebot

Are peer reviewers influenced by their work being cited? Version of record at
@elife.bsky.social. Thorough and useful peer review - who needs and impact factor?!

Links to paper and code/data ⬇️

📄https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/108748
💻https://github.com/agbarnett/cited_reviewers

Drittmittel in der Forschung: Neue Studie zur Vergabe - Lübecker Forscher Sören Krach schlägt frühe Lotterie vor Geld für die eigene Forschung zu beantragen, ist aufwendig, die Vergabe von sogenannten Drittmitteln oft ungerecht. Wissenschaftler aus Lübeck schlagen nun ein neues Verfahren vor: Das Los soll mitentscheiden.

Drittmittel in der Forschung: Neue Studie zur Vergabe - Lübecker Forscher Sören Krach schlägt frühe Lotterie vor: Geld für die eigene Forschung zu beantragen, ist aufwendig, die Vergabe von sogenannten Drittmitteln oft ungerecht. Wissenschaftler aus Lübeck schlagen nun ein neues Verfahren vor: Das…

Flugsteuer muss bleiben – jetzt Appell unterzeichnen Die Koalitionsspitzen wollen die Flugsteuer senken – auf Kosten des Klimas. Das müssen wir verhindern!

✈️ Die Koalitionsspitzen wollen die Flugsteuer senken – und gleichzeitig wird das Deutschlandticket teurer. Statt Billigflüge zu subventionieren, sollten sie lieber in die marode Bahn investieren und für günstige Zugtickets sorgen. Jetzt Appell unterzeichnen ➡️ aktion.campact.de/s/flugsteuer...

NL funder NWO recently changed rules for grant applications to endorse more modern recognition & reward practices.

But in my reading, the updated preproposal rules (CV, output, & just the slightest teensy weensy hint of a research idea) fully lean into Matthew effect.

Thoughts?

Come work with us!

Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? A widespread observation is that people avoid mentally effortful courses of action, and much recent work examining cognitive effort has explained subjective effort evaluation – and, consequently, pref...

New pontification piece with @awestbrook.bsky.social and Jean Daunizeau, just out in TICS:
Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly?
(or why does it hurt to think)

never written a review paper before in my life, that was a new and unusual experience

New work with @simyciri.bsky.social. Adults make more accurate decisions than adolescents—yet show more intrusion from irrelevant players. We explain this paradox via efficient information compression: adults rely on combinatorial social basis functions that use group structure as a mental scaffold.

Graphic of a head with a circle in it with arrows. Arrows suggest circle repeats itself.

Repetitive negative thoughts will be investigated using a range of cutting-edge brain science techniques as part of a new study led by the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford and funded by Wellcome @wellcometrust.bsky.social 👇
tinyurl.com/364es88k

Happy to share my new paper published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: A critical look at statistical power in computational modeling studies, particularly those based on model selection.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

🎓🧪🔬🔭💵
Much-needed data on lottery-based funding! #SNF

Our current system wastes resources (~40 days for applicants, ~10 days for reviewers for ~85% rejection).

It selects great grant writers, not necessarily great projects, with strong biases against minorities.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

“data show an increase of 10% in submissions & 23% in funded projects from female applicants with the lottery-first approach compared to a previously used procedure. Additionally, the lottery-first approach was estimated to have 68% lower economic costs compared to single-stage peer review approach”

Intraindividual Trajectories of Belief Updating in Relation to Depressive Symptoms: Reduced Integration of Positive Performance Feedback - Sebastian Meyerhöfer, Charlotte Ottenstein, Lukas Kirchner, L... Previous research suggests that depression is related to difficulties with revising established negative expectations. However, it is not yet clear how precisel...

New paper in CPS 🎉: We developed and validated a novel trial-by-trial belief update task, which allowed us to examine the association with depression quite precisely: dep symptoms were related to a slower update of established negative beliefs following pos info. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Preprint!

Led by Jan F Weis, we show that self-compassion predicts positive affect and self-esteem, & protects self-esteem in low performers. Also, positive affect reflects reward expectations & prediction errors, and regret, but independently from self-compassion.

#selfcompassion

bit.ly/SC_PA_SE

Join us for this talk by @janhaaker.bsky.social on "A functional view on how we respond to others’ pain: Empathy, threat learning and neuropeptides"
11 November, 1pm CET

tu-dresden.de/mn/psycholog...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

A potential solution to peer review issues in science funding. Really interesting. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Something to look into for the RoR-project I'm co-authoring for NWO!

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line - Nature Communications The authors show evidence from a German funding line that a lottery-first approach followed by peer review is accompanied by increased female representation both at the submission stage and among fund...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced economic cost

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gaming the peer review system: a sophisticated review mill in medicine highlights the need to ensure reviewer integrity Background A review mill is a network of researchers who game the peer review system to apparently boost their citations. Members write generic review reports containing suggestions for citations to t...

New pre-print out on peer-review milling! Together with @deevybee.bsky.social and M. Angeles Oviedo Garcia.

Enjoy!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...