Alex Holcombe

"40% of papers about subarachnoid haemorrhage in animals contained manipulated images."

We have to face up to the fact that in some fields, over half of published science might be fake.

The courtyard of the Jameh Friday mosque in Esfahan

Illicit singing and dancing (banned) under the bridge in Esfahan. Esfahan was known as a place where the mullahs had less control over such things.

Under the bridge in Esfahan

The famous square in Esfahan again (not sure about the second photo).

There are so many beautiful mosques that some look neglected, with no tourists. This is the Nasir-ol-molk mosque in Shiraz.

Buying spices in the Shiraz bazaar

The 18th-century Karim Kahn citadel in Shiraz

Here are schoolchildren, I think in Esfahan. Looks like one of the famous bridges?

In 2004, I visited Esfahan and Shiraz, two beautiful cities that the NYT is showing have now been hit by the US (hoping military targets). The plaza in Esfahan is one of the beautiful in the world. Here is the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque seen from Ali Qapu palace.

Well, I suppose my university had a good run. They've only turned on this maddening feature now, in 2026.
(As if I don't email people outside my university all the time)

This and other publish-review-curate initiatives should help scholars avoid getting trapped in corporate publishers' exploitative walled gardens.

Home - MetaROR MetaResearch Open Review MetaResearch Open Review MetaResearch Open Review A new platform designed to transform how we review and share metaresearch A new platform designed to transform

In the area of non-corporate, diamond #openaccess, we are doing something akin to funneling in a non-profit way at MetaROR.org, a metaresearch peer review platform. We have 12 partner journals that authors can transfer their reviews to.

I sometimes make this point to the exploited academic editors when I respond to the Nature family of journals' reviewer requests.

As the reviewer crisis (the shortage of peer reviewers) worsens, this unfortunately favors corporate publishers who have created hierarchical journal families (e.g. Nature->Nature Comms->Nature Comms Psych) that they use as a funnel, which includes passing on peer reviews, saving the authors time.

Just email them and ask for a grant to study how microcredit helps grow businesses, increase revenue, and ward off accusations of cavorting with sexual predators.

If you haven't yet changed how you teach and evaluate thanks to AI, you probably need to. This is not something that educators asked to happen, but it is worth noting what is out there - in this case an OpenClaw tool designed to cheat.

How does our brain excel at complex object recognition, yet get fooled by simple illusory contours? What unifying principle governs all Gestalt laws of perceptual organization?

We may have an answer: integration of learned priors through feedback. New paper with @kenmiller.bsky.social! 🧵

Stealth corrections. "This directly contradicts earlier statements from Elsevier. " I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!
deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/02/gues...

Do you mean to say that somehow in the US, birds don't have rifles??

same here, they were strutting about when I was there. Zealandia so cool, so inspirational!

Making things right would be a hassle!
Although to be fair, I think right after that he says something like "but that is not the question facing the Court, we deal only in Law" so it is kind of just a gratuitous needling..

I am trying harder to understand the mind of the clever craven corrupt crony class. This is one of the core competencies of our times!
So I read Kavanaugh's dissenting opinion about the tariffs.

Guest Post — Diamond Open Access Needs Institutions, Not Heroes - The Scholarly Kitchen Today's guest blogger asks: What would it mean to support community-led publishing as infrastructure, rather than as a collection of heroic individual efforts?

Think of all the money research funders have poured into the maw of the Big Five publishers, paying for APCs instead of funding diamond #openaccess infrastructure, what a shame! scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/02/18/g... "Open access needs institutions not heroes"

Thanks Moin!

The path toward ethical science is paved with diamonds I discuss why diamond open access is necessary to reduce perverse incentives in science, and to improve the outputs of Gen AI. Over the last two decades awareness of a Reproducibility Crisis penetrated all scientific disciplines. Studies recently showed that 90% in STEM and 95% in psychology were aware of this Crisis1,2. At its core … Continue reading The path toward ethical science is paved with diamonds

"The reproducibility crisis is a crisis of trust. The findings scientists ... tout as facts, are often not replicable by others."

Nate Breznau argues that the reproducibility crisis is a structural one - and that there is a solution: Diamond #OpenAccess 👇

Trying again #icanhazpdf doi.org/10.1212/WNL.... Would like to have this article! Possibly good example for my class of a new observational article treated uncritically by the press as causal (www.theguardian.com/society/2026...)

Elsevier also NPG review decline rejection email Elsevier review rejection email Dear Dr. X, Thanks for thinking of me as a possible reviewer, as I am interested in the topic. However, certain scientific publishers, such as your publisher Elsevie...

Yes please do! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

That's right, we go back to the old-boys'-network system, or its modern equivalent... one has to be connected or have a track record to be trusted. Much progress toward equity will be reversed.

Interested whether you have any ideas about how to do that... In the face of enormous amounts of fraud and AI slop, much of which will be indistinguishable from middle-tier if not top-tier work.