Interesting podcast on Open Science and its enemies

Now that I have a couple of moments to breathe, I've been able to spend a bit of time on Bluesky (which is where a lot of academic Twitter landed after Elon Musk took over the platform and made it far worse), and reconnect with some folks whose work I respect. I have been gathering that there might be some trouble in paradise among the community advocating for Open Science. I've seen some chatter about a preprint that offers a very broad definition of what may be considered questionable research practices that have at least some in the community suggesting that the definition really is too broad. I may come back around to that, but if and when I have the time to do more than give the preprint an initial reading. Instead, I'll focus on a podcast that I had never heard of before entitled The Error Bar. It's a clever title, and the host, Nick Holmes, certainly strikes me as witty and open-minded. He is planning a three-part series on what he refers to as Open Science and its Enemies. This week's podcast is called the p-circlers. We can think of p-circling as reverse p-hacking according to Dr. Holmes. The upshot is that p-circlers hone in on a finding they do not like and then look for ways to make the finding seem suspect or so trivial as to not even be worth examining in the first place. Holmes focuses on one finding that seemed to create a stir, and a preprint that ends up resorting to p-circling behavior in order to explain away the findings as much ado about nothing. If you have 26 minutes or so to spare, it is a worthwhile podcast episode, and hopefully will provoke some thought. Since I have some proverbial skin in the game when it comes to presenting open science practices in my undergraduate methods courses, I want to make sure that our actions really do move our respective disciplines and sub-disciplines forward, rather than simply weaponize a series of recently developed tools for post-peer-review and in turn lead us to making the same mistakes as our predecessors. Anyway, give this episode a listen. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

P.S.: If you do not like listening to podcasts, Nick Holmes also blogs his podcasts. Here is the blog post for the episode on p-circlers.