AIMOS: Recorded Session Gems Now Online

Bob tweeted about it, I posted about it, and recently it happened: The AIMOS zoomfest. The program is here.

AIMOS, just 3 years old, advances meta-science, a big part of which is the scholarship and advocacy that advances Open Science. This is the third conference, and now, supported by a generous donation, planning is in full swing for the establishment of a Journal of Metascience–to be open, of course. (I don’t think that journal title has been settled yet.)

Many sessions were recorded and are now online. Below are a few gems–there are many more worth exploring, at the YouTube channel. It’s great to hear of OS advances and advice from law, economics, medicine… and many more.

Brian Nosek: The Story so far here

Brian, ED of the Center for Open Science, describes the massive OS progress these last ten years. His abstract is a neat summary:

Scholarly studies of science are as old as science itself. The last 10 years of metascience has a unique character. Compared with other scholarly treatments, it is more data-driven, collaborative, grounded in the discipline it studies, applied, interventionist, and activist. Metascience studies how the system works, proposes how it should work, develops interventions to change how it works, and evaluates whether those interventions are having the desired effects. The last 10 years reflects the emergence of metascience as a scholarly activity not just to understand science but to improve it.

Rose O’Day: We Need to get on With Getting Stuff Done here

Brian gave us an informative welcome. Rose book-ended the meeting by sending us off energised to actually get real change done. She was given the online equivalent of a standing ovation.

Bob Explaining The New Statistics to Improve Statistics Education

Alas, the recording system slipped up, so no video. Bob did a rapid-fire and very neat job. His slides are here.

Meta-Analysis: the Latest here

Three minitalks, then discussion. Highlights for me included: Tari Turner (1:40 – 14:00) on how ‘live meta-analysis‘ provided constantly updated coronavirus evidence to guide ever-changing public policy these last two years. And Shinichi Nakagawa (14:40 – 29:40) on meta-analysis of variances, with diverse great examples of why this can be vitally important.

Assessing the Risk of Bias in the Studies in a Meta-Analysis

Alas again, no recording for this workshop run by Matt Page. We heard about his ROB-ME tool, and in small groups used it for a couple of examples. My take-away: It’s not possible to avoid considerable subjectivity in assessing bias. The only solution is for all researchers to follow the full Open Science list of better practices (of course). But it’s a tool worth investigating; it may be the best we have. Read about it here and here.

How to Start a Revolution in Your Discipline

A terrific discussion, again with no recording. Lots of hand-wringing about how hard it is to get take-up of OS practices. Dorothy Bishop responded by advocating a focus on small philanthropic funding bodies, for which every dollar really matters. Therefore they, more than any other stakeholder, are likely be most responsive to the argument that OS practices can greatly increase the cost-effectiveness of research.

WikiJournals, and Bridging From Journals to Wikipedia here (see 29:20 – 36:00)

Pages in Wikipedia typically get 1,000 times as many views as a journal article–or more. I hadn’t known about the many efforts to find some sort of integration. Some journals have rules about authors posting an update or new page to Wikipedia. Wikijournals have appeared. The experiments continue. Fascinating stuff from Thomas Shafee, of La Trobe.

What does damage to scientific progress look like? here

Time for three cold showers to enrage us, and energise our future efforts towards OS and research integrity. It’s chaired by the indefatigable David Vaux (Davo), distinguished fraud detective and campaigner for an Australian Research Integrity body–against strong university opposition. (Shame!)

Other AIMOS gems

There are lots of other gems to discover. That YouTube site? It’s here.

Happy digging,

Geoff