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aaronclauset.bsky.social
Aaron Clauset
@aaronclauset.bsky.social
6K followers 120 following 1.1K posts
NO KINGS. NO FASCISTS. FUND SCIENCE.

Professor of Computer Science @ BioFrontiers Institute at University of Colorado, Boulder and External Faculty @ Santa Fe Institute

orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3529-8746
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
academicresistance.bsky.social
Faculty senates are under attack from new legislation that sidelines faculty voices and undermines academic freedom. The latest AAUP report defends independent, representative governance as essential to higher ed’s integrity. @aaup.org academeblog.org/2025/11/18/i...
In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates
BY AFSHAN JAFAR We have recently seen accelerating legislative and political attacks on faculty governing bodies at state institutions, including legislation recently enacted in Indiana, Ohio, Utah…
academeblog.org
November 21, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
paulgp.com
Update your syllabus and stay on the frontier - it will increase your students’ wages. Epic work by my colleagues @barbarabiasi.com and @profsongma.bsky.social #linkoftheday

www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/...
November 15, 2025 at 12:44 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
jugander.bsky.social
📣 Postdocs at Yale FDS! 📣 Tremendous freedom to work on data science problems with faculty across campus, multi-year, great salary. Deadline 12/15. Spread the word! Application: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31114 More about Yale FDS: fds.yale.edu
Yale University, Institute for the Foundations of Data Science
Job #AJO31114, Postdoc in Foundations of Data Science, Institute for the Foundations of Data Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, US
academicjobsonline.org
November 18, 2025 at 3:54 AM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Video for my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" on 4 Nov, with a lovely audience (see thread below for slides) #scienceofscience
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPXl...
November 13, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
brendannyhan.bsky.social
A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 14d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
cohodes.bsky.social
📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣

"The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct"
Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu
Screenshot of working paper: The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct
November 10, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
danlarremore.bsky.social
For folks doing academic faculty hiring — 

What kind of platform does your university require you to use? Interfolio? Avature? Something else?

Are you able to batch-download the dossier PDFs, or do you pay for someone to hand-download them all?
November 5, 2025 at 11:13 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week

I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital

aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...
Slide title: "network effects in scientific labor" networks mediate most scientific activities: 1. scientific training, hiring, collaboration, teaching, attention, peer review, etc. 2. networks act like a form of unequally distributed social capital a productive collaborator --> increases your productivity a prominent collaborator --> increases your prominence How much does who you work with impact your productivity and prominence? Slide title: "model checking". Shows the results of applying our probabilistic generative from Li et al. Nature Communications (2022) for estimating individual productivity and prominence parameters from observed collaboration network data. This "nets out" the network, and estimates individual levels of activity. Left figure is joint distribution of productivity lambda and prominence theta, showing productivity is tightly concentrated around 0.42 papers/year, while prominence has a long tail, with most mid-career scientists (we studied 200,000 from 6 STEM fields) have very low prominence. Right figure shows pairwise correlation matrix of measures like number of papers, number of citations, lambda, theta, having a high-lambda coauthor, and having a high-theta coauthor. Strong correlation between your own number of papers and having a high-lambda (very productive) coauthor, etc. Good sanity checks for the model. Slide title "gender vs. productivity & prominence" Notes decades of past work showing a "productivity gap" between men and women, in which men publish more papers and receive more citations over time. But, after "netting out" their collaboration networks, we find no gender difference at all between individual productivity and individual prominence, implying that it's difference in who men and women work with (the size and composition of their collaboration networks) that drives the observed gap in productivity, not differences at the individual level. Slide title "how important is who you work with?" This is a wrap-up slide from the end of the talk: networks act like unequally distributed social capital in science they mediate our scientific attention, evaluation, and collaboration differences in collaboration networks can explain gendered differences in productivity & prominence early-career productivity & prominence what else? can we intervene in these networks to mitigate inequalities? funds for new collaborations, eg, after parenthood? early-career fellowships to work with elite senior coauthors?
November 6, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
khrisnin.bsky.social
I love how Rep. Joe Neguse reframed this question.
October 31, 2025 at 8:19 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
diegokoz.bsky.social
🧵 1/
🚨 New paper out in PLOS ONE! w/ @caropradier.bsky.social @benzpierre.bsky.social @natsush.bsky.social @ipoga.bsky.social @lariviev.bsky.social
We studied 43k authors and 264k citation links in U.S. economics to ask:
👉 Why do some papers cite others?
🔗 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
October 27, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
needhibhalla.bsky.social
@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"
Scaling back DEI programmes and the loss of scientific talent
Nature Cell Biology - Programmes that support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in science are under attack in the USA. Data indicate that diversity in the scientific workforce increases...
www.nature.com
October 23, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
bakerdphd.bsky.social
Really well done this

defector.com/higher-eds-r...
Higher Ed’s Rush To Adopt AI Is About So Much More Than AI | Defector
If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, you may have missed the flurry of news stories and social media banter about AI adoption in higher ed, stories which have snowballed into th...
defector.com
October 23, 2025 at 11:33 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents
acadpubnews.bsky.social Academic Publishing News @acadpubnews.bsky.social · Oct 24
"AI returns to the university as part of a broad effort to further corporatize universities, vocationalize higher-education instruction, and diminish both research and research-based pedagogy."
October 24, 2025 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
ent3c.bsky.social
In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.
Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are
Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.
www.theatlantic.com
October 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
netscisociety.bsky.social
This month, no colloquium but a special session about careers in network science! Join us and an all-star panel on October 29. Register here for a Zoom link: iu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
October 13, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
crsugimoto.bsky.social
Please come join our team! Looking for junior and senior faculty in science, technology, and innovation policy!!
aarondlevine.bsky.social Aaron Levine @aarondlevine.bsky.social · Oct 7
The Carter School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech invites applications for multiple open-rank tenured and/or tenure-track faculty positions with a focus on science, technology and innovation policy.

careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...

#AcademicSky #PolicySky @appam.bsky.social
October 8, 2025 at 1:10 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
This was a fun talk to give. Our new results show that "Meta-learning optimizes predictions of missing links in real-world networks" (arxiv.org/abs/2508.09069). tl;dr: graph neural networks are a limited tool for predicting missing links in most networks
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRYz...
GraphGeeks Talk: Meta-Learner That Finds the Best Link Prediction Model
YouTube video by GraphGeeks
www.youtube.com
October 6, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
icelabumu.bsky.social
Why does a gender gap in scientific “productivity” persist?
📅 Oct 8, @aaronclauset.bsky.social in Umeå: biased networks, not ability, explain the difference. Join us!
🔗 www.umu.se/en/events/ic...
@umeauniversitet.bsky.social
October 3, 2025 at 8:24 AM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
My fellow academics: the @aaup.org is doing amazing work, successfully! defending faculty and universities against attacks from Vought/the Trump administration. Proud to be a member. It takes only 3 minutes to join, to support them fighting the good fight for all Americans ✊ www.aaup.org
AAUP Home
www.aaup.org
October 2, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Trump's higher ed ransom note is here - everyone would have to acquiesce to their unprecedented demands or not be "given priority for grants," plus they can demand "reimbursement" for "violations" www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

A mechanism to enforce fealty. An attack on academic freedom and democracy
October 2, 2025 at 1:32 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
netsciconf.bsky.social
📌 Save the Date!

The flagship conference of the Network Science Society - 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 - is coming to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭-𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲.
Prepare to share ideas, discoveries & challenges in network science.

Registration opens soon! 🔗 www.netsci2026.com
September 30, 2025 at 4:56 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
It took me 2 minutes to write about how this proposed rule would eliminate all foreign PhD students, who are a critical part of US science and technology, and drive US innovation and economic growth
September 27, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
peerreviewcongress.bsky.social
Presented at PRC10: Mss characteristics associated w being sent for review, final acceptance @science.org #ScienceAdvances 2015-19 include institutional prestige, country, team size
www.science.org/cont...
@jeffreybrainard.bsky.social @aaronclauset.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social @aaas.org
Whose papers have an edge at Science? In unusual study, journal looks in the mirror
Confidential data show being in the U.S., at a prestigious institution, and in a large team all may help
www.science.org
September 25, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
meredithshiner.com
I submitted my comment and I hope you all will join me.

www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
My public comment submitted to the Department of Education on their attempts to roll back the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program "It is incredibly important that all Americans of good faith and motivated by a commitment to service have the opportunity to work in roles that support others without being saddled with lifetime debt or riddled with anxiety over being able to pay their bills and live their lives. Our country works best with a functioning government, staffed by a wide range of talented professionals. To reverse this critical program, to make public service a luxury career path for those who can afford it, as opposed to incentivizing Americans from all walks of life to give back to their country, is a step in the wrong direction. Some of the best, smartest professionals I know were only able to serve the public through the existence of this program and to eliminate it is an insult to them and to every American who has benefited from their contributions to our society."
September 17, 2025 at 7:26 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Folks who've used name-based gender labelers in comp. social science work, I understand that 'nomquamgender' (via this paper) ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC... squeezes the maximal signal out of name databases. Has there been any evaluation of LLM accuracies for this task? Pointers welcome!
An Open-Source Cultural Consensus Approach to Name-Based Gender Classification | Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
ojs.aaai.org
September 10, 2025 at 9:54 PM