Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Daryl O’Connor @daryloconnor.bsky.social · 15d

Fancy being a journal Section Editor?

Exciting Opportunity: Two new Section Editors needed for Cogent Psychology.

One for 'Personality & Individual Differences' & one for 'Social Psychology'.

Why not submit an application.

Details below. D/l 7th Nov.
think.taylorandfrancis.com/editor_recru...

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 2d

Love the look of this Call for Papers in Perspectives on Psychological Science: "Psychology in 2125 – A Century Forward"

Editor: Arturo E. Hernandez
What will psychological science look like in the year 2125?

www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Call for Papers: Psychology in 2125 – A Century Forward

Editor: Arturo E. HernandezWhat will psychological science look like in the year 2125?This special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science invites contributors to imagine the long arc of our di...

www.psychologicalscience.org

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 4d

Happy Life of a Showgirl day, everyone 🧡🧡🧡 It is everything I hoped it would be

niamhestack.bsky.social @niamhestack.bsky.social · 4d

This also feels like a good day to reread @maddipow.bsky.social excellent piece for @psychmag.bsky.social www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

A (psychology) love letter to Taylor Swift… | BPS

…from Dr Madeleine Pownall, Lecturer in Psychology (Teaching and Scholarship) at the University of Leeds.

www.bps.org.uk

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 4d

Oh my goodness I LOVE IT. (Also happy Life of a Showgirl release day 🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡)

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Elisabeth Bik - Perpetrator 5, a fraudulent microbiologist @elisabethbik.bsky.social · 5d

UKRIO @ukrio.bsky.social is introducing an Authorship Integrity Toolkit:
a set of practical, adaptable resources designed to support both individual researcher contributors in their day-to-day practice and organisations in developing policies and managing projects.
ukrio.org/resources/th...

The Authorship Integrity Toolkit - UK Research Integrity Office

The Authorship Integrity Toolkit Practical resources to support responsible authorship in research UKRIO is pleased to present the Authorship Integrity Toolkit – a new collection of resources to help ...

ukrio.org

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 9d

Women let down by how institutions handle incidents of sexual harassment – new study reveals almost half of women reporting incidents have negative experience #highered
https://ow.ly/tBIF50X2V5N

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 15d

Gave 3 welcome lectures to our lovely new and returning psychology students today. God I’ve missed teaching so, so much

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Paul Whaley @dangerwhale.bsky.social · 25d

Just gonna say that this is a foundational principle of EBTC (ebtox.org) that I work for, where part of the function of the collaboration is to provide support for people who might be marginalised in their workplaces, and we have a cast-iron don't-be-a-dick policy for involvement.

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 20d

This morning I gave a talk in beautiful Norrköping about how scientific credibility may be enhanced by embracing mess and bias, rather than clinging to objectivity and a PhD student gifted me this sticker that says “scientific objectivity? Girl please”. I love it here 🇸🇪💕

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 22d

Sometimes all of this is motivating and makes me want to do write and do things and make noise, and sometimes it's just paralysing. Today is the latter of those times

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 23d

Is anyone else finding the whole existential and intellectual threat of AI, rise of far right sentiment, mainstreaming pornification of women’s bodies, and erosion of human rights thing a bit much at the moment? Because same

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Fred Oswald @foswald.bsky.social · 23d

Psychological Methods invites early-career psychologists to apply to be a 2026 Editorial Fellow. This year kicked off our EF program -- it was enriching for the EFs and rewarding for everyone involved. Let's do it again!

For details:
www.apa.org/pubs/journal...

@apajournals.bsky.social

www.apa.org

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Dr Afrodita Marcu 🇷🇴🇬🇧🇪🇺 @afrodita-marcu.bsky.social · 25d

A very good article, worth a read!

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 29d

"Hostility, exclusion and academic bullying should be formally recognised as research integrity issues because they directly impact who gets to succeed and whose voices are silenced."

By @maddipow.bsky.social

Research integrity needs a kindness agenda or we will lose ECRs

Responding to early-career researchers’ honest questions with accusations of misconduct is a travesty of open science, says Madeleine Pownall

www.timeshighereducation.com

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · Sep 7

This is such an important thread, but this post really made me sad, because the broader scholarly infrastructure has (been) eroded to the point that knowledge exchange simply can't exist in the way it used to and there's little that journals can do about it.

Because that infrastructure was people.

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · Sep 6

Editors are trying their best to maintain the scholarly infrastructures of knowledge exchange. It's not easy or feasible for most to set up open access elsewhere. Our journals, whatever their myriad faults, have helped sustain fields over years and decades.

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 28d

So excited to be heading to lovely Sweden next week to give a talk to Linköping University about reflexivity and research integrity and to give my first public lecture at the Norrköping Visualiseringscenter about the history of women in science reform! 🔭✨
visualiseringscenter.se/en/event/key...

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 29d

Yes, completely agree. Throw precarity, overwork, stress, and redundancy threat into the already toxic mix of pressure to publish + publication bias and you've got a perfect storm for pretty bad research integrity behaviours, I think

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · 29d

Wrote this on the train home from Metascience. Can’t quite believe this one needed saying, but I really think that if conversations about research integrity and open science don’t take academic bullying seriously, we’ll keep perpetuating the same system that science reform was trying to change.

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 29d

"Hostility, exclusion and academic bullying should be formally recognised as research integrity issues because they directly impact who gets to succeed and whose voices are silenced."

By @maddipow.bsky.social

Research integrity needs a kindness agenda or we will lose ECRs

Responding to early-career researchers’ honest questions with accusations of misconduct is a travesty of open science, says Madeleine Pownall

www.timeshighereducation.com

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 29d

"This would mean building policies and practices, at every level, that support not only rigorous research but humane and compassionate interactions with one another: the values of collegiality, care and thoughtfulness that open research claims to promote."

#OpenSci #MetaSci #AcademicSky #PhDSky 🧪

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

James Bartlett @bartlettje.bsky.social · Sep 8

Our contribution to an upcoming book on teaching open science was "how to teach reproducible research". There are plenty of lesson plans or individual courses out there but less on how you can build skills across a whole degree.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · Sep 7

Oh WOW 😍😍

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

RoSE Network @rosenetwork.bsky.social · Aug 28

We’re looking for enthusiastic colleagues to join our voluntary committees and help shape the future of statistics education.

Current vacancies are now live
lnkd.in/eAXCBZ3j

📅 Deadline: 10th September 2025 (midnight, your time zone)
👉 Apply here: lnkd.in/euqHE4s4

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

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Reposted by Dr Madeleine Pownall

Elisabeth Bik - Perpetrator 5, a fraudulent microbiologist @elisabethbik.bsky.social · Sep 4

SV: I would like to ask the scientific community to expect more of journals. We should expect them to be transparent and accountable, just as they expect us to be transparent and accountable.
We can chose to review for journals that align with our vision.
#PRC10

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Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · Sep 4

Ok!

Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social · Sep 4

So jealous that I'm not at #PRC10 (because I haven't yet figured out how to clone myself and be in two places at once) but the programme looks so brilliant. I really hope there's some discussion about how framing peer review as pedagogy may be a useful way forward too
wonkhe.com/blogs/peer-r...

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