The turmoil surrounding Elon Musk’s handling of his Twitter takeover has renewed concern over the perils of a public good in private hands (Nature 613, 19–21 (2023); see also Nature 614, 602; 2023). Another form of scholarly public discourse is also owned by profit-driven entities — academic publishers. We propose an answer to both problems.

The most-discussed solution for Twitter is migration to Mastodon (see Science 378, 583–584; 2022), a social-technology platform that communicates over a distributed network of servers (‘instances’ in the ‘Fediverse’), akin to e-mail, and is immune to private takeover. Similarly federated solutions exist for journal articles (B. Brembs et al. Preprint at Zenodo https://doi.org/gn6jjc; 2021), but free social interaction is still hampered by inertia in scholarly organizations — in particular, resistance by scholarly societies that rely heavily on publication income.

There is now a golden opportunity for every scholarly society to implement a Mastodon instance for anyone interested in their field. If the academic community can create a public resource protected from private interests, it could become a model for bringing the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — into the Fediverse.

Nature 614, 624 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00486-3

Hi, I'm currently working on an assignment regarding p-hacking. I want to make the point that p-hacking can have real-life consequences, as the data being put out there could be applied in the wrong way. I already have an example of how p-hacking led to the WHO canceling their distribution of malaria medication.

But, I need a specific example from psychology, and I can't find anything. I find plenty of papers explaining that p-hacking is common and why it's a problem, but no concrete examples of studies where p-hacking was discovered. Does anyone have an example in mind? Or maybe a study whose results have been questioned?

Thank you in advance!

Sign-ups to FediScience.org, the Mastodon server for publishing scientists, have exploded today. We probably had more sign-ups today than in 2022 before.

Like with email you have to pick a server to sign-up and then you can talk to (almost) everyone. Here is a list of options for people interested in science, academia, GLAM, etc. https://fediscience.org/server-list.html