Everything Hertz

138: Preprints in the time of coronavirus (with Michele Avissar-Whiting)

August 16th, 2021 | 1 hr 6 mins

We chat with Michele Avissar-Whiting about her role as the Editor-in-chief of the Research Square preprint platform and how she weighs up the benefits and costs of potentially problematic preprints during a pandemic

137: Ten rules for improving academic work-life balance

August 2nd, 2021 | 53 mins 21 secs

Dan and James share their thoughts on a recent paper that proposes ten rules for improving academic work-life balance for early career researchers and the figure from this paper that became a meme.

136: Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewed journals?

July 19th, 2021 | 50 mins 29 secs

We discuss Journal Reviewer (journalreviewer.org), which is a website that provides a forum for researchers to share and rate their experiences with journal's peer review processes. We also cover how some journals negotiate the way in which their impact factors are calculated

135: A loss of confidence

July 5th, 2021 | 50 mins 53 secs

Dan Quintana and James Heathers chat about well-known psychology studies that we've now lost confidence in due to replication failures and the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis-driven research.

134: Paywalled questionnaires

June 21st, 2021 | 56 mins 39 secs

We discuss a recent retraction triggered by the authors not paying a copyright fee to use a questionnaire (that also happened to be critical of the original questionnaire).

133: Manuscript submission fees

June 7th, 2021 | 49 mins 8 secs

Some journals use nominal manuscript submission fees to discourage frivolous submissions. However, it has been suggested that increasing submission fees could reduce article processing charges. Dan and James discuss this proposal, along with the recently released code of conduct for scientific integrity from the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.

132: Post-pandemic academia

May 17th, 2021 | 50 mins 44 secs

Dan and James discuss how academia should operate in a post-pandemic world. What pandemic practices should we keep and what should we abandon?

131: Long live the overhead projector!

May 3rd, 2021 | 1 hr 3 mins

Dan and James answer listener audio questions on indirect costs for research grants, the mind/body problem, and why many academics aren't trained to teach. They also profess their love for the overhead projector

130: Normalizing retractions (with Dorothy Bishop)

April 19th, 2021 | 1 hr 14 secs

Dan and James chat with Dorothy Bishop (University of Oxford) about the importance of normalizing the retraction of scientific papers, publication ethics, and whether paper mills (companies that make fake papers at scale) are an issue in the psychological sciences

129: Transparency audits

April 5th, 2021 | 56 mins 51 secs

Dan and James discuss the recently proposed "transparency audit", why it received so much blowback, and the characteristics of successful reform schemes

128: How do you generate new research ideas?

March 15th, 2021 | 1 hr 11 mins

Dan and James chat about how they come up with new ideas, why everyone seems to be trying to monetise their hobbies, and why it's so hard for most labs to have a singular focus of research.

127: Speak up or shut up?

March 1st, 2021 | 51 mins 11 secs

We discuss when is the right time in your academic career to begin speaking up to critique your research field or whether the risk of retaliation means you should shut up and keep your head down

126: The division of scientific labor (with Saloni Dattani)

February 15th, 2021 | 52 mins 13 secs

We have a wide-ranging chat with Saloni Dattani (Kings College London and University of Hong Kong) about the benefits of dividing scientific labor, the magazine she co-founded (Works in Progress) that shares novel ideas and stories of progress, and fighting online misinformation

125: Upon reasonable request

February 1st, 2021 | 46 mins 58 secs

Dan has a blue-sky proposal to increase data sharing—that funders mandate scholars to store and analyse data on their servers for which the funder decides what constitutes a reasonable data request (among other benefits)

124: From Ptolemy to Takeshi's Castle

January 18th, 2021 | 51 mins 17 secs

We discuss under which circumstances retracting decades-old articles is worth the time. We also chat about why LinkenIn is underrated (yes, really) and special journal issues are overrated.

123: Authenticated anonymity (with Michael Eisen)

January 4th, 2021 | 53 mins 49 secs

Part two of our chat with Michael Eisen (eLife Editor-in-Cheif), in which we discuss the pros and cons of collaborative peer review, journal submission interfaces, Michael's take on James' proposal that peer reviewers should be paid $450 dollars, why negative comments on peer reviews need to be normalised, plus much more.

Episode Archive