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
Tanja Bogusz (Center for Sustainable Society Research, Universität Hamburg)
Biologische Stationen wurden in den STS bislang maßgeblich als „Grenzobjekte“ (Star & Griesemer) zwischen Feld und Labor (Kohler) untersucht. Im Gegensatz zu zeitlich begrenzten Expeditionen, oder zur „reinen“ Laborforschung praktizieren Meeres-Stationen folglich „Wissenschaft mit den Füßen im Wasser“ und sind zugleich in konkreten lokalen Gesellschaften verortet. Durch ihren spezifischen Standort befinden sie sich somit am Kreuzpunkt zwischen zwei Gebieten, die in der modernen Wissenschaftsorganisation als voneinander getrennt verstanden wurden – Meer und Gesellschaft. Meeresstationen verbinden diese nicht nur epistemisch, sondern auch physisch und temporal. Entsprechend ermöglichen Meeres-Stationen multiple Formen der Organisation von Meer-Gesellschafts-Beziehungen und marinen Wissens. Nach einer Schätzung der World Association of Marine Stations (WAMS) existieren rund tausend Meeres-Stationen weltweit. In einer Zeit jedoch, in der nachhaltige Zukünfte für Küstenbevölkerungen häufig Anlass für öko-soziale und politische Polarisierungen sind, handelt es sich bei der Integration multipler Formen von Meereswissen um eine hochkomplexe Angelegenheit. Auf der Grundlage einer rund drei-monatigen Ethnographie an der ältesten aktiven Meeres-Station der Welt, der Station Marine Concarneau, Bretagne, reflektiert mein Vortrag spezifische Modi heterogener Kollaborationen zwischen Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Zunächst stelle ich die Station vor, d.h. ihr spezifisches Forschungsprofil, sowie ihre lokale und länderspezifische Exposition. Nach einer kurzen Einführung in die methodologischen Grundlagen meiner Studie (Pragmatismus, STS, Marine Social Sciences) diskutiere ich drei Typen dort beobachteter heterogener Kollaborationen a) sozio-material, b) sozio-epistemisch und c) sozio-disziplinär. Abschließend diskutiere ich daran anschließende Überlegungen zur systematischen und strategischen Bedeutung von Meeres-Stationen für inter- und transdisziplinäre Kollaborationen vor dem Hintergrund der globalen Transformation von Meer-Gesellschaft-Beziehungen.
*recorded and presented on 15.11.2023
Berna Devezer (University of Idaho, United States)
Protzko et al. describe a project in which internal tests of pilot-tested hypotheses and independent replications embraced “rigour-enhancing practices” such as confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency. The authors report a high estimate of replicability, which, in their appraisal, “justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries”. However, replicability was not the original outcome of interest in the project, and analyses associated with replicability were not preregistered as claimed. Instead of replicability, the originally planned study set out to examine whether the mere act of scientifically investigating a phenomenon (data collection or analysis) could cause effect sizes to decline on subsequent investigation (https://osf.io/ba8p7). This “decline effect” hypothesis, posited by one of the authors and not articulated in the published manuscript, invokes phenomena that, if found, could revise the “laws of reality”. The project did not yield support for this preregistered hypothesis; the preregistered analyses on the decline effect and the resulting null findings were largely relegated to the supplement, and the published article instead focused on replicability, with a set of non-preregistered measures and analyses, despite claims to the contrary.
*recorded and presented 25.06.2025
Amelia Acker (University of Texas at Austin, United States)
This talk examines how commercial cloud services and data integration platforms are shaping scientific knowledge infrastructure and institutional approaches to digital preservation and archival access. Drawing on findings from two collaborative research projects—a decadal analysis of data management plans from NSF funded scientists and the Palantir Files, a public interest archive documenting the firm’s data integration services—I explore how platforms are transforming traditional roles of information institutions in providing access to data. The presentation investigates three key developments: the increasing adoption of commercial cloud services (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud) for storage in scientific data management, the rise of data integration platforms in research environments (GitHub and Figshare), and the implications for institutional autonomy in providing access to archives and publicly funded science. By examining the adoption of platform services in research data management and digital preservation, this work identifies key tensions between open access and commercial platform control. The conclusion will explore counter-archiving projects and institutional strategies that challenge platform dominance while reimagining archival access in a time of networked science.
*recorded and presented on 28.05.2025
Martin Reinhart & Felicitas Hesselmann (RMZ, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
This talk explores the historical evolution of scandals related to academic integrity and their implications for the relationship between science and politics. We argue that there are three distinctive waves of scandalization since the postwar era: The first wave, starting in the 1970s, led to governance measures addressing public trust issues in science funding. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a second wave centered on research misconduct, prompting the establishment of boundary organizations such as the Office of Research Integrity. Since the 2010s, the third wave shifted focus to concerns such as Open Science and reproducibility, giving rise to a mainly intra-scientific moral entrepreneurship that unfolds not along one-time scandals anymore, but as part of a continuous crisis discourse. This current wave of reform movements is met with considerably less intra-scientific resistance than its predecessors and hence may inadvertently achieve regulatory goals surpassing previous political intentions.
*recorded and presented on 11.06.2025
