Randy Ellis

This is unfortunate:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...
I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

Hi folks! Want to reintroduce a thing I'm leading at @cos.io: the Registered Revisions (meta) Trial.

This project about new peer review policy and a WILD new way of doing actionable evidence generation via RCTs. A LOT of RCTs.

Now piloted and ready for the main stage, and looking for partners! 🧵👇

We're delighted to be part of this new Registered Reports funding partnership - or RRFP - with @improvingpsych.org!

RRFPs boost the efficiency of RRs by integrating grant review and Stage 1 review. Authors submit before they have funding & then receive Stage 1 acceptance + funding at the same time

New personal record of desk rejects 🥳

I am taking a note of journals that take over a month for the desk 📖

It is also a unusual situation where pretty much everything has been already reviewed at eLife on our Neuro paper (click for open reviews), now the sample size is just substantially larger.

Congratulations!

Worth reading in full. Many important implications here:
* Wiley can only publish preprinted papers if final version differs substantially from preprint
* After peer review, preprints are no longer preprints (careful with resubmissions!)
* Wiley will change journal policies without consulting EiC

This is just *nuts* from Wiley.
A preprint that has been revised, say following submission & rejection by one journal (ie authors modify and reorient based on reviewer feedback before trying somewhere else) is no longer a preprint?
So only virgin preprints are acceptable to a Wiley journal??

If Wiley is PCI-hostile, I am now Wiley-hostile. No more reviewing/publishing with them from me.

In 2024, Infant and Child Development (ICD) withdrew as a PCI RR-friendly journal and reneged on three Stage 1 recommendations issued by PCI RR. In addition, Wiley – the publisher of ICD – notified PCI RR and the PCI core team of its decision to withdraw all Wiley journals from PCI and PCI RR, including an additional 9 PCI-friendly journals. Finally, Wiley appears to have banned all of its ~1600 journals from considering submissions that have been previously reviewed by PCI or PCI RR. This statement explains the history of ICD joining PCI RR and developments that led to the current outcome. The PCI RR Managing Board believes that this shift in policy to become “PCI-hostile” renders Wiley journals incompatible not only with community-based preprint review but with preprint archiving in general.

NEW: Statement from the PCI RR Managing Board on the withdrawal of Infant and Child Development as a PCI RR-friendly journal, and the decision by Wiley to refuse preprints that have been peer-reviewed by @peercommunityin.bsky.social / @pci-regreports.bsky.social

Read here ➡️ osf.io/tn8mh

Congrats!!

Introducing the Medical Evidence Project And the quest to make less dead people

Friends, I have news.

It is very good news.

You'll just have to read it, I'm afraid.

jamesclaims.substack.com/p/introducin...

A flowchart. The first box has text "Build a model" and arrow to the second box. The second box has text "Model and prior checking" and arrows to the third and fourth box. The arrow with text "not good" goes to the third box, which has text "Refine model" and an arrow back to the second box. The arrow with text "good" goes to the fourth box, which has text "Use the model".

I'll talk about Bayesian workflow Thu 24th April 11-12 CEST in Learn Bayes seminar by Karolinska Institutet @ki.se learnbayes.se/events/bayes... (zoom available)

The focus will be different to my previous workflow talks (see users.aalto.fi/~ave/videos....). This time more flowcharts and shortcuts

New pre-print out. We tackle the most common criticisms of NHST and show how to adress them. With NHST 🤯

I am a professor at Columbia University. All of the student NIH training grants have been canceled and now there are reports that ALL funding will be frozen. Why are Universities not banding together and speaking out publicly and forcibly about governmental attacks on biomedical research?

OK I had announced this before but forgot to say that Andrew Gelman would be joining Nancy Cartwright and myself as well. Short idea talks, lots of panel discussion and Q&A.

Join us on April 25th to discuss RCTs, replications, and scientific inference.

sites.google.com/view/cepbi/t...

The meta-analysis on the relationship between Fluoride and IQ by Taylor et al. (2025) that RFK Jr. has cited contains major methodological flaws and data integrity issues that we describe in the following pre-print (submitted to meta-psychology): osf.io/preprints/os...

Okay, I'm not done yet but I have been instructed to head to the #EuroCIM2025 student mixer and I guess you get the idea.

I've been struggling to explain this in talks just working with the equations; I think the figures should make it a lot easier to follow along.

Methods and Assumptions: A new section in Cortex

Chuffed and excited to announce a new journal section in Cortex:
*Methods and Assumptions* is open for submissions starting today!

Read the opening editorial here (OA): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/

Being snatched off the street for your opinions. I'll say it again. We are deciding, right now, whether the aspirations we hold for this country are finished. Whether we're going to let these hoodlums and grifters throw what's left of the American idea into the garbage for their own profit and gain.

🎓Paper time!✨ #ICLR spotlight.

Concluding of 5 years of research on missing values handling for prediction:
Beware of diminishing returns in imputation for prediction.
1/8

Agree that promoting registered reports > replication studies. Great review of a book I now need to read

One of the NIMH PIs whose name is the termination list: Sooyhun Lee, whose lab just published this beautiful @nature.com paper (that has received too little press because comms at NIH are down). Read! Cite!

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

I'm not sure that our study necessarily implies that one should not average trials - averaging will always have its place. However, our results do show that there is substantial and meaningful variability across trials that is lost when averaging. #neuroscience #neuroskyence

After being alerted about possible misconduct, the I4R are reproducing published papers that use data from a specific NGO (GDRI). This thread releases the first 2 reports and provides more information about the work and responses/statements from authors journals and journals. 🧵

📚 Results reporting for clinical trials led by medical universities and university hospitals in the Nordic countries was often missing or delayed
www.jclinepi.com/article/S089...

Renowned scientific integrity investigator endows fund to support fellow sleuths Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik donates $200,000 to support training, travel

Elisabeth Bik has donated her $200k Einstein Foundation Award to create a fund to train and support research integrity investigators

I Have Written You A Book On Forensic Metascience Use it to cause trouble

Friends, I have written you a book on forensic metascience.

It is free. You can have it. Happy St. Valentine's Day.

If you wish to give me a gift back, you can use it to cause trouble - the greatest gift of all.

open.substack.com/pub/jamescla...

📖 Open Social Psychology Textbook 📖
Call for Contributors 🙋🏻‍♀️

New FORRT initiative to develop an open-access textbook on social psychology. Goal: summarize 🏛️ classical findings 🏛️ and discuss them in light of replication attempts.

🧵 Find out how you can get involved below 👇

Megaphone icon with text 'Open call for 3Rs Challenges'.

⏰ The CRACK IT open call for 3Rs Challenges closes on Monday 10 February. If your organisation is facing a scientific or research challenge that could be solved with a 3Rs approach, get in touch to discuss and submit your idea to sponsor a Challenge.

💡 Find out more: nc3rs.org.uk/crackit/news...