Paula Muhr (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration that gathered over two hundred international scientists famously revealed the first empirical images of a black hole—a mysterious cosmic object thus far regarded ‘unseeable’. To create these revolutionary images that visualise the immediate surrounding of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87, the EHT team used a constellation of seven radio telescopes that spanned the Earth and then spent two years algorithmically reconstructing empirically reliable images from the thus collected non-visual data. To obtain valid imaging results, the EHT team deployed multiple methodologies during the image reconstruction process, which all delivered sufficiently consistent results. Apart from revealing their final images to the public, the team also made their processed data and algorithms accessible to the public.
In 2022, five studies authored by scientists who were not members of the EHT team were published. Each study focused on reanalysing the publicly available EHT data, testing if they would obtain sufficiently similar images of the black hole. The stated purpose of these epistemic critiques was to verify the epistemic truth claims of the EHT’s final images of the black hole. The authors of each study thereby deployed different approaches. Some replicated the procedure developed by the EHT team; others developed alternative algorithmic techniques for reconstructing images from the EHT non-visual data. Four of the five critical reanalyses converged on their findings by obtaining images that were sufficiently similar to the initial EHT images published in 2019. One study diverged in their results and was subsequently criticised by the EHT team for its methodology.
As my paper will show, this circulation of the epistemic critique in the community of astrophysicists focused on imaging black holes is far more than a contrived academic exercise. Instead, it is of critical importance for the epistemological consolidation of the currently emerging research field of black hole imaging and, with its fine-grained methodological insights, has the potential to inform future EHT analyses and results. However, while the importance of critical replication studies for the community of specialists is difficult to overestimate, this type of discipline-specific epistemic critique remains highly hermetic. Since the implications and import of such a critique remain opaque for non-specialists, its circulation remains constrained to the members of the scientific community.
Paula Muhr obtained her PhD at the Institute of Art and Visual History, Humboldt University in Berlin (From Photography to fMRI: Epistemic Functions of Images in Medical Research on Hysteria, Bielefeld: transcript, 2022). She studied visual arts, art history, theory of literature and physics in Novi Sad and Belgrade (Serbia), Leipzig and Berlin. Her research is at the intersection of visual studies, science and technology studies (STS) and history of science and focuses on examining the epistemic functions of visualisation technologies in natural sciences. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for History of Art and Architecture, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
https://kit.academia.edu/PaulaMuhr
*recorded and presented on 12.07.2023
Willem Halffman (Radboud University, Netherlands) & Serge Horbach (Radboud University, Netherlands)
Two competing imaginaries inform the current wave of innovations in research publishing: one that perceives ‘the literature’ as a library of research accounts, and one that sees it as a gigantic database. While the library portrays acquiring knowledge as an act of reading texts informed by an understanding of their inter-textual setting, the database sees the literature as a collection of verified facts that can be extracted, or ‘mined’. Both imaginaries present different understandings of what the research literature is, of which knowledge is valued in that literature, how it should be curated and what it should be usable for. Using basic notions of socio-technical infrastructures and inspired by the work of Ricœur, we analyse how these imaginaries are at work in current publishing innovations, such as new tools for enriching text with tags for uniquely identified research entities, new publication platforms and formats such as micro-publications or mega-journals, or forms of meta-analysis. We highlight how both imaginaries can derail into phantasmagories and explore how reflecting on their premises can inform productive accommodations of both.
*recorded and presented on 07.01.2026
Sebastian Büttner (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
In aktuellen politischen Debatten etwa zur Klimapolitik oder zu Corona ist einmal mehr deutlich geworden, dass es sehr unterschiedliche Vorstellungen zur Rolle, zum Status und zur Geltung von Wissen und Expertise bei gesellschaftlichen Grundsatzfragen gibt. Zwei Extrempositionen makieren dabei den Korridor der aktuellen Debattenlandschaft: Es gibt einerseits die Verfechter:innen einer konsequent wissensbasierten Politik, verkörpert im Slogan “follow the sciences”, andererseits betont antiintellektuelle und wissenschaftsskeptische Positionen, verkörpert im Topos “alternativer Fakten” bei Trump und Co. Dieser Beitrag nimmt diese aktuellen Tendenzen einer wachsenden Politisierung von Wissen und Expertise wissenssoziologisch in den Blick. Diskutiert werden Grundlagen der Expertise-Forschung in der Soziologie und grundlegende normative Färbungen der Debatte. Entgegen der These einer problematischen “Epistemisierung des Politischen” (Bogner) wird hier dafür plädiert, gesellschaftliche Spannungslinien und dahinterstehende Wert-, Verteilungs- und Identitätskonflikte stärker in den Blick zu nehmen als bisher.
*recorded and presented on 20.09.2023
Sheena F. Bartscherer (RMZ, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany), Sven Ulpts (Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University, Denmark), Bart Penders (School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, Netherlands), Sarahanne Field (Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, Netherlands)
Since claims about a ‘replication crisis’ started to circulate, the concept and practice of replication have gained new momentum. Some communities have started to promote replication indiscriminately as a practice and criterion for research quality irrespective of the diverse research communities’ various conditions and ways of knowledge production. Others have identified a replication drive, which involves moving replication into various research communities. This drive is enacted by incentivizing or demanding replication and related Open Science practices, and forms part of a culture change strategy towards increased replicability. Here, we propose the two-dimensional social replication of replication framework. It describes the process of moving replication across epistemic communities and enables us to understand first how the diverse epistemic communities across the research landscape relate to replication as a concept, practice and evaluative criterion and, second, which changes it undergoes along the way. The framework’s two dimensions are adaptation and adoption. Moving replication into different research communities without sufficient adaptation may lead to a potentially problematic and inappropriate social replication of replication. We thus argue that sustainable and appropriate social replication of replication requires adaptation, or more precisely a process of co-adaptation between replication and a community’s already established technologies of accountability.
*recorded and presented on 10.12.2025
Marco Seeber (Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Norway)
The seminar describes the dramatic transformation of the scientific publishing market in the last 30 years. It discusses the forces underpinning this process, its implications for science and scientists, and proposes individual and policy actions to counter some of its problematic aspects.
*recorded and presented on 26.11.2025
Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri (Département Informatique, Université Claude Bernard Lyon, France) & Jie Xu (School of Information Management, Wuhan University, China)
In the ever-changing world of Academia, rules and values are at stake. These form the basis of new regulations, including openness. The Harbinger research project was a six-year international research project investigating the extent to which early career researchers (ECRs) are contributing uniquely to this change, allowing to identify continuums or cracks. This presentation focuses on the results from France and China, shedding light on the shared values of ECRs, their compliance with open science policies, and the differences in their publication, collaboration and socialisation strategies. The presentation will also discuss how these differences in approaching new values and norms contribute to a new research culture, which may represent a call for a reimagining of Homo Academicus.
*recorded and presented on 12.11.2025
Jesper W. Schneider (Aarhus University, Denmark)
The talk by Professor Jesper W. Schneider (Aarhus University, Denmark) will introduce and discuss the concepts of questionable research practices and misconduct. Examples will be given, and we will end by discussing suggested remedies to the challenges.
Prof. Jesper W. Schneider (Aarhus University, Denmark) will introduce and discuss the concepts of questionable research practices and misconduct. We will discuss their alleged widespread use, the suggested reasons why, and the presumed effects they have on the science system, not least their role in the so-called replication crisis. Examples will be given, and we will end by discussing suggested remedies to the challenges. The talk is based on the preprint „Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? Cross-national evidence for widespread involvement but not systematic use of questionable research practices across all fields of research.“ (https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/r6j3z/)
Jesper W. Schneider will speak at the BUA-seminar ‚So geht Wissenschaft – Aktuelle Diskussionen zu Open Science und Forschungsqualität‘, hosted by Professor Martin Reinhart (Humboldt-Universität Berlin/Robert Merton Center for Science Studies).
*recorded and presented 27.11.2023
Christian Greiffenhagen (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong)
Peer review has never been a uniform practice, but is now more diverse than ever. Despite a vast literature, little is known of how different disciplines organise peer review. This paper draws on 95 qualitative interviews with editors and publishers and several hundred written reports to analyse the organisation of peer review in pure mathematics. This article focuses on the practice of ‘quick opinions’ at top journals in mathematics: asking (senior) experts about a paper’s importance, and only after positive evaluation sending the paper for a full review (which most importantly means checking the paper’s correctness). Quick opinions constitute a form of ‘importance only’ peer review and are thus the opposite of the ‘soundness only’ approach at mega-journals such as PLOS ONE. Quick opinions emerged in response to increasing submissions and the fact that checking correctness in mathematics is particularly time-consuming. Quick opinions are informal and are often only addressed to editors. They trade on, indeed reinforce, a journal hierarchy, where journal names are often used as a ‘members’ measurement system’ to characterise importance. Finally, quick opinions highlight that a key function of the peer-reviewed journal today, apart from validation and filtration, is ‘designation’ – giving authors items on their CV.
*recorded and presented on 15.10.2025
Monika Krause (London School of Economics & Political Sciences, United Kingdom)
The talk explores the role of models and model system in the production of scientific knowledge in the context of the institutions and inequalities of internationalised science. It discusses formal models and model systems as vehicles for findings that circulate as of relevance across geographic and cultural contexts and asks: How do researchers access these in different geographical contexts and different disciplines? What are the consequences of access and non-access for researchers and the knowledge produced?
*recorded and presented on 09.07.2025
Julian Hamann (Erziehungswissenschaften, Arbeitsgruppe Hochschulforschung, Humboldt Universität)
Der Postdoc-Phase wurde als zentraler Qualifizierungsphase zuletzt auch wissenschaftspolitisch viel Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Doch die Rolle von Postdocs ist offen und unterbestimmt. Die Aufgaben, mit denen Postdocs betraut werden, sind vielfältiger und komplexer als in der Promotionsphase, gleichzeitig erfahren sie weniger Orientierung und Anleitung. Der Vortrag befasst sich mit der Frage, wie Postdocs lernen was es heißt, „ein Postdoc“ zu sein. Dabei wird auf eine bisher vernachlässigte Funktion wissenschaftlicher Wettbewerbe verwiesen: Verschiedene Wettbewerbe um Stellen, Drittmittel und Publikationen sind nicht nur Mechanismen zur Verteilung knapper Ressourcen. Sie haben auch eine bislang wenig berücksichtigte sozialisierende Funktion, weil sie Postdocs die an sie gestellten Erwartungen und Anforderungen vermitteln. Anhand von Interviews mit 60 Postdocs in Physik und Geschichtswissenschaft wird in einem ersten Schritt rekonstruiert, welche Wettbewerbe Postdocs welche Erwartungen und Anforderungen vermitteln. In einem zweiten Schritt wird gezeigt, inwiefern diese unterschiedlichen Erwartungen und Anforderungen bei Postdocs zu Zielkonflikten führen, die schließlich zu einer systemischen Überlastung der Postdoc-Rolle führen.
*recorded and presented on 18.10.2023
