💡 This is an idea I've toyed around with for a few years, but never wrote down. I would love to hear your feedback! Competitive research processes lead to many perverse incentives - incentives that put the researcher and the research process at odds. For example, because of selective publication pressures researchers primarily end up publishing those research processes that end up in significant or novel results.

Starting a small company means the buck stops with me on everything, every time. Since founding Liberate Science three years ago, that means I’ve had to pick up a lot of skills.

I used to introduce myself as a recovering academic in the years 2018-2022. Only now in 2023, am I comfortable saying I am a recovered academic. Having recovered, I am in a comfortable place to start sharing some personal stories that have not seen the light of day before in written form.

💡 These are my remarks for the junior researcher panel at the APE2023 conference. This blog is slightly edited for clarity and expands the quote selection from Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz died a decade ago today - to commemorate him I’ll start by reading selected quotes from the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto here today. I would argue to reframe publishing as a question of power — as Aaron talked about it: Information is power.

In my decade working on the openness of research I touched upon content accessibility only a few times, in part because it was and is a less discussed topic in my circles. But that does not make it less important.

This week I am a bit at a loss what to write about - I had drafts on the weaponization of meta-research, how to write an R package in 2022 (but the year's almost out), the consequences of owning your digital infrastructure. But none of it really fell into place enough yet.