Dr Madeleine Pownall

'..commitment to openness and freedom reflects a strikingly instrumental logic. These values are to be protected not as ends in themselves, but because they are believed to drive scientific progress & deliver tangible (often marketable) outcomes, thus ultimately serving political & economic agendas"

Lovely to host you in our school Dr Madeleine Pownall! Thank you for sharing your insights with Aston community!

“Most job adverts for senior management positions begin with the need for the applicant to have a world-leading academic record.

But isn’t that rather odd given that neither teaching nor research are in the senior manager’s job description?” 💯

Check out our new preprint on "How to Develop and Use Open Educational Resources" 📖✨

This iteration will later be published in a new book "Teaching Open Science" edited by @drcpennington.bsky.social and @maddipow.bsky.social. Watch this space! 👀

osf.io/preprints/ed...

Had a lovely lovely time chatting about what could be the (inclusive, collaborative, reflexive) future of open science at @astonpsychology.bsky.social this week. Thanks @drcpennington.bsky.social for hosting me and chatting open science non-stop for 3 full days 📚

Fancy being a journal Section Editor?

Exciting Opportunity: Two new Section Editors needed for Cogent Psychology.

One for 'Personality & Individual Differences' & one for 'Social Psychology'.

Why not submit an application.

Details below. D/l 7th Nov.
think.taylorandfrancis.com/editor_recru...

Love the look of this Call for Papers in Perspectives on Psychological Science: "Psychology in 2125 – A Century Forward"

Editor: Arturo E. Hernandez
What will psychological science look like in the year 2125?

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Happy Life of a Showgirl day, everyone 🧡🧡🧡 It is everything I hoped it would be

Oh my goodness I LOVE IT. (Also happy Life of a Showgirl release day 🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡)

The Authorship Integrity Toolkit - UK Research Integrity Office The Authorship Integrity Toolkit Practical resources to support responsible authorship in research UKRIO is pleased to present the Authorship Integrity Toolkit – a new collection of resources to help ...

UKRIO @ukrio.bsky.social is introducing an Authorship Integrity Toolkit:
a set of practical, adaptable resources designed to support both individual researcher contributors in their day-to-day practice and organisations in developing policies and managing projects.
ukrio.org/resources/th...

Women let down by how institutions handle incidents of sexual harassment – new study reveals almost half of women reporting incidents have negative experience #highered
https://ow.ly/tBIF50X2V5N

Gave 3 welcome lectures to our lovely new and returning psychology students today. God I’ve missed teaching so, so much

Just gonna say that this is a foundational principle of EBTC (ebtox.org) that I work for, where part of the function of the collaboration is to provide support for people who might be marginalised in their workplaces, and we have a cast-iron don't-be-a-dick policy for involvement.

This morning I gave a talk in beautiful Norrköping about how scientific credibility may be enhanced by embracing mess and bias, rather than clinging to objectivity and a PhD student gifted me this sticker that says “scientific objectivity? Girl please”. I love it here 🇸🇪💕

Sometimes all of this is motivating and makes me want to do write and do things and make noise, and sometimes it's just paralysing. Today is the latter of those times

Is anyone else finding the whole existential and intellectual threat of AI, rise of far right sentiment, mainstreaming pornification of women’s bodies, and erosion of human rights thing a bit much at the moment? Because same

Psychological Methods invites early-career psychologists to apply to be a 2026 Editorial Fellow. This year kicked off our EF program -- it was enriching for the EFs and rewarding for everyone involved. Let's do it again!

For details:
www.apa.org/pubs/journal...

@apajournals.bsky.social

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

A very good article, worth a read!

This is such an important thread, but this post really made me sad, because the broader scholarly infrastructure has (been) eroded to the point that knowledge exchange simply can't exist in the way it used to and there's little that journals can do about it.

Because that infrastructure was people.

So excited to be heading to lovely Sweden next week to give a talk to Linköping University about reflexivity and research integrity and to give my first public lecture at the Norrköping Visualiseringscenter about the history of women in science reform! 🔭✨
visualiseringscenter.se/en/event/key...

Yes, completely agree. Throw precarity, overwork, stress, and redundancy threat into the already toxic mix of pressure to publish + publication bias and you've got a perfect storm for pretty bad research integrity behaviours, I think

Wrote this on the train home from Metascience. Can’t quite believe this one needed saying, but I really think that if conversations about research integrity and open science don’t take academic bullying seriously, we’ll keep perpetuating the same system that science reform was trying to change.

"This would mean building policies and practices, at every level, that support not only rigorous research but humane and compassionate interactions with one another: the values of collegiality, care and thoughtfulness that open research claims to promote."

#OpenSci #MetaSci #AcademicSky #PhDSky 🧪

Our contribution to an upcoming book on teaching open science was "how to teach reproducible research". There are plenty of lesson plans or individual courses out there but less on how you can build skills across a whole degree.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Oh WOW 😍😍

We’re looking for enthusiastic colleagues to join our voluntary committees and help shape the future of statistics education.

Current vacancies are now live
lnkd.in/eAXCBZ3j

📅 Deadline: 10th September 2025 (midnight, your time zone)
👉 Apply here: lnkd.in/euqHE4s4

SV: I would like to ask the scientific community to expect more of journals. We should expect them to be transparent and accountable, just as they expect us to be transparent and accountable.
We can chose to review for journals that align with our vision.
#PRC10

Ok!

So jealous that I'm not at #PRC10 (because I haven't yet figured out how to clone myself and be in two places at once) but the programme looks so brilliant. I really hope there's some discussion about how framing peer review as pedagogy may be a useful way forward too
wonkhe.com/blogs/peer-r...