A few weeks ago it became known that Diederik Stapel, a Professor at the University of Tilburg, and one of Hollands most celebrated social psychologists, committed academic fraud. I didn't write anything about it before, because the details and the extent of the fraud were largely unknown. But after the publication of an interim rapport on Monday, I felt the urge to write a few words about it. After all, this case reflects very badly on psychological research, and perhaps on the whole of science.

So what happened? Basically, Stapel made up data. Lots of it. And some of it got published in prestigious academic journals such as Science. It appears that Stapel acted alone, and played an elaborate act to fool his co-workers. According to the interim rapport, the usual chain of events was as follows:

Together with a co-worker, which could be one of his PhD-students, a post-doc, or a fellow senior academic, Stapel came up with a research question and, together, they designed an experiment. All the details of the study were discussed and decided on, again, together. So far, so good. Next, Stapel went to a school to conduct the actual experiment (he often worked, or pretended to work, with schools). By himself, this time. Because, or so Stapel argued, the schools knew him. They trusted him. And it would be inappropriate and unnecessary for other researchers to accompany him on these visits.

In actuality, we now know, Stapel did not visit any schools at all …

Gnotero, the standalone sidekick to the Zotero reference manager, has gotten a major revamp, and has been renamed to Qnotero. The (slight) name change reflects a switch in the underlying graphical toolkit, from Gtk to Qt (for those who care about nerdy details). The functionality offered by Qnotero is basically the same: You can quickly search through your Zotero references, and open attached PDFs. So what's new?

Compared to Gnotero, Qnotero is 

• prettier
• themeable (right now there are a few different color and icon schemes)
• faster
• fully functional on Windows
• drag-and-droppable (you can drag PDFs from the search results onto, say, your desktop)

Get it here!

Yesterday I received a semi-spam e-mail from Royal Society Publishing, publisher of Biology Letters and Philosophical Transactions, saying that all of their articles that are more than 70 years old are now freely accessible. In itself, this is a laudable move, of course. And you could say it's an important step in the more general shift towards an open access model of academic publishing (i.e., a model were all academic papers are freely accessible for everyone). But I couldn't help being a little skeptical, particularly after having read this note, attached to a torrent, which I came across a few months back (a torrent is a file that serves as a 'handle' for downloading more and larger files). The Pirate Bay is not a place were you would normally expect to encounter political statements, but this torrent of 18,592 papers, all published prior to 1923, from the archive of the Philosophical Transactions is accompanied by a text that conveys many of the same frustrations that I feel when it comes to academic publishing.

First, the uploader (who calls himself Greg Maxwell, which kind of sounds like a real name) explains that the part of the archive that the Royal Society has so valiantly decided to make freely available, was largely, if not entirely in the public domain to begin with. Copyright simply expires after some time. As the uploader writes (this was before the Royal Society opened up their archive):

"The documents are part of the shared heritage …

PLoS Biology celebrates the release of Paul Feyerabend's latest book, The Tyranny of Science, with two book reviews. (The Tyranny of Science was published posthumously, as Feyerabend passed away in 1994.) Before we get to the reviews, let's start with some quotes from Feyerabend's 1975 claim-to-fame bestseller, Against Method, to give you a flavor of what the famous philosopher of science was all about (no quotes from The Tyranny, I'm afraid, because I don't have a copy):

"Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise. (...) The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes."

What a delightful opening! Although I would have expected no less from a celebrity intellectual from the 70s. Perhaps the statement is a bit devoid of meaning, but it makes very clear that, in Against Method, shit is going to hit the fan. (Incidentally, I assure you that our department, with its 12:30 brown-bag lunches, departmental Christmas dinners, yearly outings, and weekly drinks on Friday at 5, is far removed from an anarchist stronghold.)

Feyerabend continues:

"For example, we may use hypotheses that contradict well-confirmed theories (...)."

Sure, a little controversy is always good.

"No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame."

Well, ok, I suppose. I would say that, if something is refuted, it was never really a fact to begin with. But that's largely semantics, because it's no trivial matter to distinguish facts from hypotheses. So in practice he's right …

I wrote a guest post about OpenSesame on the NeuroDebian 'insider blog' (link), and I thought this would be a good time to share how development of OpenSesame 0.25 "Dashy Darwin" is coming along.

And "Dashy Darwin" is coming along nicely! A lot of bugs have already been fixed. There's not much new functionality, but quite a bit of polish has been added to the interface. For example, the controls of the sequence item have been revamped (see the screenshot above). You can now re-order and add new items to a sequence by dragging and dropping, which is a definite improvement over the use of buttons.

For those who are keen to try out the new version, experimental packages (0.25-pre1, Windows, Linux and Source — no Mac OS yet, sorry!) can be downloaded here. But the usual warnings apply: This is a potentially highly unstable, experimental snapshot!