[TALK] Possible submission to Metascience 2025 conference

[penyuan]

Date of talk

2025-06-30

Details of the talk

Proposals are now open for the Metascience 2025 conference to be held at University College London in, well, London, United Kingdom:
https://metascience.info/call-for-proposals/

💀 Submission deadline: "23:59 GMT on Friday 7 February 2025"

Event description:

A global gathering for knowledge sharing, community building, and opportunities to define a roadmap of research and intervention priorities to accelerate science.

I think it may be of interest to the Turing Way community to submit a proposal for, according to their website, one of "virtual pre-conference symposia, in-person panel sessions, and talks or posters on any topic related to metascience". Also, many Turing Way community members are in that geographical area!

Two very rough ideas for possible submission(s) to get things going:

1. It seems some folks in the Turing Way community have some useful critiques of the (in)famous model of academic cultural change proposed by the Center for Open Science, culminating in the Turing Way chapter that was recently published. Many (though not all) of the people behind this conference were those who originally postulated said pyramid. So, my thought was that if folks can come up with a coherent/constructive critique that can be delivered in, say, a 15 minute talk or a workshop, then it might make for a good submission.
2. A separate idea is a submission about disciplinary/epistemic diversity in open/meta research communities. Many here helped me develop my lightning talk about it at the 2024 FOSDEM open research devroom. I'm not quite sure where to take it, but I certainly feel that the metaresearch/metascience community is dominated by STEM voices at the exclusion of others!

In addition to this thread, we will discuss possible proposal(s) for this conference at the Turing Way collaboration cafe on January 15, 2025 at 15:00 UTC:
https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/ttw-collaboration-cafe

Input appreciated!!

Checklist

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[penyuan]

Note for those following this issue: We will discuss possible proposal(s) for this conference at the Turing Way collaboration cafe on January 15, 2025 at 15:00 UTC:
https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/ttw-collaboration-cafe

[penyuan]

Thank you to everyone who joined the discussion during the 15 January 2025 Collaboration Cafe!

Some bullet points I jotted down:

1. Of the ideas, it seems the idea of improving representation of epistemic diversity might be more tractable (see idea 2 in the original post above).
2. @KirstieJane had the great idea of having researchers representing that diversity there to talk about their lived experiences, such as a history professor @penyuan interviewed who said they "don't see anyone like me" in open research communities and feel excluded.
3. @malvikasharan stressed the importance of values, leadership, accountability, and power.
4. @RichardJActon - Elevating people of the diversity we feel under represented to answer questions like how does open research matter, in which ways, etc.?
5. @Arielle-Bennett - Make it two-way, so rather than e.g. a history professor saying what they want, it's two-way so that there's, for example, also what can diverse disciplines make use of what's coming from open science? Also, we're not limited to tackling this in the Metascience meeting! We could, for example, have a fireside chat with people representing diverse epistemologies.

Please correct me if I misrepresented something!

With that in mind, in the last few minutes of the meeting, I suggested:

1. Since it's hard to gather a group of discussants within two weeks for the proposal deadline, I'll draft a submission for a talk instead.
2. @penyuan is attending a UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) meeting next week (22 January 2025) to bounce this idea with the people there.
3. @penyuan will try to circulate the draft proposal in this issue and among the Turing Way within the next couple weeks for your critique! (...famous last words... 🤦🏻)

P.S. @Arielle-Bennett shared this, the Journal of Open Humanities Data: https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/

[EstherPlomp]

I like @Arielle-Bennett 's idea for a fireside - that would make it more accessible to multiple people. I'm not sure if the conference sessions are being streamed or recorded?

I personally do still like the first option, but I don't think I'll have capacity to pick that up... :)

[penyuan]

Thanks @EstherPlomp

I'm not sure if the conference sessions are being streamed or recorded?

Good question! I don't see that on the conference website, so - to be safe - I'm going to assume the in-person sessions will not be streamed or recorded...

[srtee]

@penyuan lovely timing -- I am putting together thoughts and materials for a course I'll be teaching next quarter, which is essentially "welcome to quantitative methods!" for first year students.

I am very keen to include a strand on numbers themselves embodying a framework of the world -- even the most "objective", "scientific" data is gathered, analyzed, disseminated, and acted upon using community resources appropriated either through social consent or raw power. I think this ties in very well with your thoughts on epistemic diversity.

I would also love to see "open research" through this lens as openness not just of sharing data -- but of access to the means of production. I work in a community where comments like "use the source, Luke!" or "it's all in the documentation" or "problem lies between keyboard and chair" make it clear that: new users can't openly ask questions or debate results even in the process of generating data without first earning the privilege*. What would openness beyond data and its transmission look like? Especially when certain disciplines are currently positioned a little further away from mostly computer-ized or data-fied concepts of openness in research?

*We [in computational chemistry] aren't just cartoon villains in this process -- we get access to immense computational resources on the social understanding that we'll do useful work with it, and preventable mistakes cost resources that could have been better used. But we could do a lot better!