Chris Hartgerink

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1608817576136-0f3a56922823?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDN8fGV1cm9wZWFuJTIwY291bmNpbHxlbnwwfHx8fDE2ODQ5MTMxNzR8MA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="(Not-)for-profit in research">I admittedly love it when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_peeve?ref=chjh.nl">pet peeves</a> show themselves. That's when I know something is tickling my brain repeatedly and it wants to come out. Last time I shared <a href="https://chjh.nl/pet-peeves-of-peer-review/?ref=chjh.nl">my pet peeves on peer review</a>, but my new pet peeve: Not-for-profit is a quick and dirty proxy for the values that we want in open science, but it is not necessary or sufficient to ensure those values.
It started tickling me on the heels of the latest <a href="https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/05/23/council-calls-for-transparent-equitable-and-open-access-to-scholarly-publications/?ref=chjh.nl">European Council statement on Open Science</a>.
<blockquote>
the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers.
</blockquote>
&#x201C;Not-for-profit&#x201D; is named many times in the statement, highlighting that EU Member States will prefer those publishing models over for-profit models. Ten (library) associations <a href="https://www.scienceeurope.org/our-resources/joint-statement-council-conclusions-on-not-for-profit-scholarly-communication-ecosystem/?ref=chjh.nl">immediately endorsed the council statement</a> and its development of a &#x201C;publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem.&#x201D; The Council statement again builds on the <a href="https://en.unesco.org/science-sustainable-future/open-science/recommendation?ref=chjh.nl">UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science</a> (2021), which calls for non-commercial open science infrastructures. A practical result of non-commercial in the dialogue like this is, for example, that the German <a href="https://open-access-tage.de/open-access-tage-2023-berlin/call-for-proposals?ref=chjh.nl#c18634">Open Access Days</a> only allows non-commercial open-source software to present their work at the conference.
So why is "not-for-profit" and "non-commercial" a pet peeve of mine?
First off, the condition of &#x201C;not-for-profit&#x201D; is not sufficient for open science because even those entities can hold values we do not want. Technically, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/23/david-koch-death-kochtopus-legacy-right-wing?ref=chjh.nl">the Koch Foundation</a> would be allowed to set up a not-for-profit publishing model, but a for-profit scholar cooperative would not. Yet, we can sense here that we would prefer the for-profit (scholar cooperative) over the not-for-profit (Koch Foundation).<a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a> As such, what is it about the idea of not-for-profits that we are valuing, really? It is not the essence of a not-for-profit.
Secondly, &#x201C;not-for-profit&#x201D; models are not necessary to make immediate open access possible at reasonable prices. Of course a lot of big for-profit actors are extracting too much profit (35% margins!) &#x2014; I don&#x2019;t contest that. Equating all for-profit actors however, from small- medium enterprises to huge conglomerates, is not doing justice to the diversity of the different business models. What matters is what values the business models manifest (see point 1) and how these entities are governed.
We cannot want new business models on one hand (no more APCs!) and then punish people for deciding to run a business instead of a foundation when creating business models.
Profit driven shareholders are problematic, but what about <a href="https://purpose-economy.org/en/whats-steward-ownership/?ref=chjh.nl">purpose driven for-profits, with steward ownership</a>? What about for-profits with scholar-led governance councils? What about for-profits owned by institutions themselves?<a href="#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a>
The hard truth: There are no (absolute) guarantees, for neither of them. Profit status is a bad proxy for the values we want. For-profits can be corrupted, a not-for-profit's governing board can be filled with cronies of the foundation&#x2019;s major donors.
Finally, starting any new publishing model with open values is difficult. Not-for-profits have the option of grant funding to get them on their way. For-profits are often ineligible for grant-funding.<a href="#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a> As a result, for-profits often need to turn to investment capital, in exchange for shares. This introduces profit driven shares, which exactly creates the problem of for-profit driven models we are trying to prevent! Focusing solely on not-for-profits exacerbates this issue as it drives for-profits to investment capital.<a href="#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a>
<hr>
Currently, a lot about the &#x201C;not-for-profit&#x201D; versus &#x201C;for-profit&#x201D; proxy remains implied. I recommend we work on making these values explicit in our discourse. I want generative models, not exploitative models, regardless of their profit motives. I want equitable models, regardless of their profit motives. Stereotyping based on their profit status is not going to help articulate our values for us.
What are the implied values of not-for-profit for you?
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item">Not-for-profits are problematic on so many levels. Examples include millionaires starting a foundation, simply to mitigate their taxable income and to maximize spending on what they value. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2" class="footnote-item">Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press being great examples of where this can go wrong. <a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3" class="footnote-item">If for-profits can get grant funding, it is really difficult to account for as businesses technically have to deliver services. If they don't need to deliver services, revenue is considered 100% profit under tax law, reducing the grant by around 30% in the case of German law. <a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn4" class="footnote-item">One option to support for-profits in the open space, would be to provide low interest and long-term loans. This would allow those models to prove themselves. <a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

In response to the European Council, I need to get a new pet peeve of mine off my chest.

(Not-)for-profit in research

<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-grey"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">This is a post in a series of <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/tag/stories-from-my-phd/">Stories From My PhD</a>. For background on this series, <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/revisiting-my-phd/">read the announcement post</a>.</div></div><img src="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2023/05/mosci.png" alt="The story behind the Mozilla Fellowship">In 2017, I received a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180315101957/https://science.mozilla.org/programs/fellowships">Mozilla Open Science Fellowship</a>, which ended up becoming a career defining opportunity. I was able to expand my horizons beyond the academic statistics work I was doing, and started germinating ideas that, after cultivation, resulted in ResearchEquals.This fellowship, however, almost did not happen. In this blog I share that part of the journey for the first time in writing.<h2 id="application">Application</h2>Around two and a half years into my PhD, I got involved with the Mozilla Science community, through their Open Leaders (OL) programme. The OL community contributed to a renewed sense of belonging and motivation, after the dreadful summer of 2016. I became resolute: I wanted to increase my efforts in improving research.
In May 2017, I applied for the Mozilla Open Science Fellowship along with almost a thousand other people from across the world. The application package included many things, including a letter of support from my supervisors. "[W]e fully support his<a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a> application" they wrote with conviction.
It was an unusual fellowship for academics - I would get paid directly if I got it. The letter of support was unambiguous though: &#x201C;[We] approve that this means he will spend .8 fte<a href="#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a> on the Mozilla Fellowship, and that his financial compensation within the Fellowship will be transferred directly to Chris.&#x201D;
At this point though, I was only one out of a ~1000 applicants. I could only dream of making it beyond that point. It felt like wishing something when I was a little kid, hoping I might get a Power Ranger toy or a new LEGO set for my birthday.
In June 2017, I interviewed for the Fellowship. Here I heard I was one of thirty (!) remaining candidates. I felt grateful and lucky to be viewed in such a way by people I deeply respected and admired that I was able to make the cut. These were people I wanted to be like, as they worked on things that carried their values instead of just dragged them along behind them. They exemplified a path I wanted to be on as well.
My enthusiasm flourished when I heard, at the beginning of July, I was one of the final ten applicants. They were going to contact one of my supervisors, in order to get their take on my application. I was so nervous I even emailed that supervisor with information on who to look for in their spam folder (just in case).
It would culminate a week or two later, when I heard I would become one of two Mozilla Fellows in the cohort. I did my little jiggly dance that I do when I my joy starts seeping through - I might have even jumped around at home in delight. I don&#x2019;t remember exactly how I celebrated, but I sure did.
&#x201C;Thank you for supporting the application procedure; this fellowship is truly a huge influence on my future career that you are facilitating&#x201D; I wrote in thanks to my supervisors.
All my notes from those days indicate is that I wrote and phoned my friends, who responded ecstaticly. &#x201C;AAAAAHHHH! What a fantastic something! This is going to be something. It facilitates so much&#x201D; I would end up writing in my personal diary.
Little did I know, the steps between getting the fellowship and doing the fellowship would be unexpected.
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item">At that time pronouns were not common in my circles. I had not started <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/my-gender-journey/">my gender journey</a> either. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2" class="footnote-item">FTE: Full-time equivalent. <a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
</ol>
</section>
<h2 id="blockade">Blockade</h2>Discussions for the logistics on how to arrange everything around the Mozilla Open Science Fellowship started in the same email thread as I announced I got it. I knew there would be some bureaucracy.
The plan was clear on: keep my PhD contract until the same end date but reduce the load to 20%. The Mozilla Fellowship would pay me for 4 days of my time for ten months, which equated to 8 months full time. From the get go I told my supervisors I was not aiming for a straight-up contract extension of 8 months. I was not interested in hanging around longer. Maybe I could use (part of) the savings to further stimulate open science by way of organizing a local conference, I proposed. My supervisors were in.
By the end of July, I emailed the department head and relayed the good news. There was a brief congratulatory remark, which felt like a &#x201C;Hope all is well.&#x201D; Then points of order raised included things such as &#x201C;it shouldn&#x2019;t impede on your dissertation work&#x201D; and &#x201C;it shouldn&#x2019;t conflict with the interests of the university.&#x201D;
&#x201C;I assume the university will pay your salary, as it goes with any other funding&#x201D; the department head continued, apparently not informed about the details of this fellowship. I simply said this was not how this fellowship worked and I had sign-off on this before I applied. It was only later I would learn they were apparently not informed about the letter of support.
Almost a month later, near the end of August, I received an unexpected calendar invitation to further discuss this career opportunity's feasibility. A month of ambiguity, uncertainty, and hallway discussions led me to decide for myself that I would not let this opportunity slip by me. Mozilla offered me a contract, and I could only wait this long before it became void.
Regardless of my resolve, the meeting with faculty management and the HR department worried me tremendously. I was preparing until 1AM the day before. When asked by my Mozilla contact how I was doing, all I said was &#x201C;Preparing.&#x201D;
This joyous thing was becoming undone to such a degree it became incredibly hard to enjoy it. The way this was being received as a problem to be solved, instead of opportunity to be embraced, left me with one big lesson: Nothing is ever unambiguously positive (or negative for that matter).
After the meeting, faculty management was clear: They would not accept the fellowship. Their email informing me of this was their birthday gift to me.
Their three main objections were as follows. First, the letter of support was not properly formatted on university letterhead (I kid you not) and should have been signed by faculty management, instead of the supervisors. Second, the fellowship conditions provided too little control for the university as to the work I would conduct, which posed a risk to them.<a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a> Finally, they objected that it was in the university&#x2019;s interest for me to finish my PhD as soon as possible, only then would I be permitted to accept the fellowship. How the final was an objection and not a wish, I do not understand to this day.
I did my task as an employee and got approval of my direct supervisors. I understand this does not abdicate me of consequences if they were not in the position to approve it to begin with. Nonetheless, being on the receiving end of all this ruined the start of a joyous occasion and turned it into a stressful one where they held this career opportunity up in the air. Why did I have to be the one resolving this if it was not a problem I caused?
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item">Note that in these stories, there are recurring people who considered my research style a thing to control. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
</ol>
</section>
<h2 id="resolution">Resolution</h2>I could not help feeling like the hurdles for the Mozilla Fellowship were an after effect of the previous run-ins I&#x2019;d had with faculty management. Once, they had even said to one supervisor that they needed to &#x201C;get that puppy under control&#x201D; (me being the puppy) - it seemed not too far-fetched to think that this was yet another vector to exert that control. Maybe they also wanted to say I was cute, like a puppy, but I imagine it was more my career stage they took a jab at. That is all speculation, but it affected me in that moment and layered the impact of this event on pre-existing dents.
Commanding me to do something is counter-productive. If you know me, I will be less controllable when you try to simply control me. The fact that they said I should finish my PhD as soon as possible, 12 months early, was ludicrous. My resolve to not accept their proposals only grew as a result of these antics, in spite of the stress hormones raging in my system.
My supervisors backed their original support of me, but our dynamics quickly deteriorated due to a difference in interests. My interest was to stay the course and making sure the Fellowship happened as-is. My supervisors wanted to manage both parties in an effort to reach a workable compromise. For me though, there was no workable compromise, hence, no process of compromising.
Despite my inner reluctance, I agreed to two weeks for diplomacy to run its course. Maybe I was wrong and my supervisors right. Maybe the university as represented by faculty management could ameliorate their position.
The university sent me their objections and I had to respond one way or the other. Not responding would have been acquiescing to the demands of the university in a legal sense. Plus, I simply promised I would respond in two weeks at the latest and my word is my bond.
Diplomacy was not leading anywhere sensible. I had to keep my promises and let my supervisors know, after they required an extension. &#x201C;There was a time to play diplomat, but that time passes tomorrow as we&#x2019;d agreed. [&#x2026;] It&#x2019;s uncomfortable for me that you change the conditions of our agreement in an already stressful situation and your position of power in relation to me. It&#x2019;s my future at stake here, and I fear you&#x2019;re trying to maintain the peace.&#x201D;
I sent my response to faculty management in unambiguous terms.
&#x201C;I regret that you have not (yet) approved the Mozilla Fellowship [&#x2026;] Because of the timeline provided by Mozilla, I already started the Fellowship [&#x2026;] I look forward to hearing the conditions [&#x2026;] under which the original plan approved by my supervisors can still be put into place. I do not intend to defend my PhD earlier than planned or as an external PhD candidate, as I have an employment contract until August 2018.&#x201D;
Sending this letter was incredibly hard. Standing firm could pull the rug underneath this tremendous career opportunity. It required all my resolution, as my supervisors considered it escalatory and emotional to stand firm.
Days passed with no remit. Maybe things happened in the background that I am not privy to - maybe not. I, ironically, had to go to the Fellowship onboarding and was out of the country when faculty management made their decision.
It was via email that I received word: All conditions would be granted. They would accept my doing the Fellowship, and reduced my contract to 20%. I never did revisit the fund for the conference, because I did not want to open a can of worms with these people ever again if not utterly necessary (spoiler: it would not be the last time). I had decided long before I wanted to get out of there, but this just added to the pile of reasons.
<hr>Thank you for reading this post in the <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/tag/stories-from-my-phd/">"Stories From My PhD"</a> series. Feel free to leave a comment below - I especially encourage you to think about some of your own stories. I write these because there are too many things that happen that we forget and never hear about - and many of our stories are worth sharing, so that we may start recognizing that we're not alone.

A peek behind the curtain of how a career defining Fellowship started.

The story behind the Mozilla Fellowship

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1474220603372-f05977f8a805?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDF8fGJhcnJlbiUyMGdyb3VuZHxlbnwwfHx8fDE2ODE0NjI0MjI&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="Undoing questionable academic practices">Over the past decade, the increased attention for questionable research practices (QRPs) and their origins led to the (Dutch) narrative on Recognition & Rewards (R&R). Very bluntly put: Incentives pressure researchers to do things that don't benefit research, so we need to change the academic incentive system.<a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a>
It is a good thing the incentive system is changing. To do so, it takes a lot of coordinated effort --- building trust, evaluating alternatives, and aligning perspectives in order to produce a different incentive system. This is not a blog about how to build trust-align-produce, though.
This is a blog about questionable academic practices (QAPs).
What are QAPs? Think of people being fired for trying to improve the workplace, professors (sexually) abusing their employees, and everyday acts of exclusion that infect a workplace. Academic bullying, including acts of sabotage, dishonesty, double standards, and shifting goalposts are forms of QAPs as well. Questionable academic practices are plentiful, <a href="https://www.knaw.nl/en/publications/social-safety-dutch-academia-paper-practice?ref=chjh.nl">widely recognized</a> and have substantive impacts on people's lives.
If people can be punished for doing their work or be abused by the people they work for, we can have all the recognition and rewards and stay in a toxic system. Left unattended, workplaces infected with questionable academic practices will fester and risks undoing R&R.
What could be a counterpart of R&R, but for questionable academic practices? If QRPs led to Recognition & Rewards, questionable academic practices have no consequential initiative attached to it (yet). I frequently discuss this topic in small, closed circles. We started talking about calling for a Accountability and Justice initiative, in order to galvanize efforts to counter questionable academic practices. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01508-2?ref=chjh.nl">Quality research requires good working conditions</a>, after all.<a href="#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a>
What might such an Accountability & Justice (A&J) initiative look like?
For starters, it could help to proactively sensitize academics to power dynamics. Power is relational, not something one feels. As a result, when powerful people do not feel powerful it is currently conflated with not having power over others.<a href="#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a> When I started teaching, I did not feel powerful but I had power over students --- yet nobody talked to me about what that might mean for how I act and am perceived. People need to learn about power dynamics, and not on their own. We have talks with kids about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_birds_and_the_bees?ref=chjh.nl">the birds and the bees</a>; let's start having talks with adults about their roles and responsibilities.
In an A&J framework, we also need to actively practice boundary setting and practice respecting boundaries. Setting a boundary is making yourself vulnerable - it requires work to articulate that something crosses a line. For example, when a PhD candidate sets a boundary for a supervisor, the supervisor must understand that the candidate is trying to improve the relationship. Disagreeing with a boundary is not an option - it denies people <a href="https://press.un.org/en/2013/gashc4085.doc.htm?ref=chjh.nl">self-determination</a>. The only option is to acknowledge and learn.
In another way, we need to start recognizing the work people are putting in to understand each other and communicate emotions. Phrases like "don't be so emotional" or "you're too complicated" are devaluing the work people put in to communicate emotions. Emotional labor <a href="#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a> is restorative when not dismissed.
Lastly, we all make mistakes - we need to teach our (academic) institutions what it takes to undo mistakes. This requires vulnerability and learning to adequately apologize. Go beyond saying you're sorry; articulate what is you will do differently. Sincere apologies are full of lessons. In any case: You break it, you fix it. The implications of this go further than I want to expand on here.
These could be some starting principles for an Accountability and Justice framework. Are you in?
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item">Researchers are not automatons, so take what I say with a grain of salt. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2" class="footnote-item">Even if quality working conditions led to no change in research quality, this would be important, I'd argue. This because we want to prevent change only when it converges with other interests (as inspired by the concept of <a href="https://harvardlawreview.org/print/no-volume/brown-v-board-of-education-and-the-interest-convergence-dilemma/?ref=chjh.nl">interest convergence from critical race scholar, Professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr</a>). <a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3" class="footnote-item">At the Recognition and Rewards Festival 2023, even Minister of Science and Education Robert Dijkgraaf said they don't feel powerful. <a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn4" class="footnote-item">A special kind of emotional labor is called <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.11?ref=chjh.nl">hermeneutic labor</a>, which is "the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one&#x2019;s own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions" (<a href="https://philarchive.org/rec/ANDHLT?ref=chjh.nl">Open Access version</a>). <a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

Why and how could we start undoing a system promoting questionable academic practices?

Undoing questionable academic practices

<h1 id="startup-therapy-series">Startup Therapy series</h1><img src="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2023/03/CNX_UPhysics_13_07_spacecurve.png" alt="New series: "Startup Therapy"">As write more on this blog, I have come to the realization I thoroughly enjoy coming up with themes to coalesce my writing around.Themes create a certain mass for my activities, reflections, and thoughts to gather around. As a result, things collect in a way they would not without the theme being present. Themes help me write.Only because of the theme <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/tag/stories-from-my-phd/">&#x201C;Stories From My PhD&#x201D;</a> did I start rummaging through my email archives, saved documents, pictures, and memories. The stories are not the cause of the rummaging, they are a result of the rummaging. That series will keep going, as I have quite some stories still in the works (even though not all of them will see the light of day).<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-grey"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">Rummaging is one of my favorite words and activities. It means to &#x201C;search unsystematically and untidily through something.&#x201D; I compare the experience to trying to tidy my room when I was a kid and getting stuck playing with whatever I came across (needless to say, it would take ages for my room to be clean).</div></div>I am going to start rummaging in my experiences for a new series of blog posts: the <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/tag/startup-therapy/">&#x201C;Startup Therapy&#x201D;</a> series. In this theme, I will explore lessons from my experiences since founding Liberate Science in 2019. Sometimes I may reflect on how running a startup has helped me work through personal problems &#x2014; the startup being a form of therapy. Another is how therapy helped me in running a business. Moreover, in this series I am also happy to take questions from people thinking about running their own project, in which the startup therapy is for you!I sort of already started the <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/tag/startup-therapy/">&#x201C;Startup Therapy&#x201D;</a> series before, but quietly. I am committing now as I am starting to notice some lessons are becoming ingrained and obvious - writing them down can help remember it wasn&#x2019;t always that obvious.

Startup Therapy seriesAs write more on this blog, I have come to the realization I thoroughly enjoy coming up with themes to coalesce my writing around.Themes create a certain mass for my activities,...

New series: "Startup Therapy"

<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-grey"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">This is a post in a series of <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/tag/stories-from-my-phd/">Stories From My PhD</a>. For background on this series, <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/revisiting-my-phd/">read the announcement post</a>.</div></div><img src="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2023/03/5.jpg" alt="Arbitrary application of arbitrary rules">I have been to a few dozen dissertation defenses over the past decade. As a result of attending PhD defenses on a fairly regular basis with the same folk, their procedures got discussed. A lot. This story is about a situation where a university's own arbitrary regulations are arbitrarily not applied.<hr>PhD regulations may vary from university to university, but they all follow similar broad strokes. For Dutch universities, I know you can find the PhD regulations easily. For example (and for no particular reason), I looked up and found <a href="https://www.uva.nl/binaries/content/assets/uva/en/research/phd/procedures/doctorate-regulations-_uva_en_2020-28-08-2020.pdf?ref=chjh.nl">the PhD regulations of the University of Amsterdam</a> within less than a minute.I attended local defenses, from the department I was in or of colleagues across the university. It made me intimately familiar with the practical aspects of the formal procedures, that are incredibly arbitrary at times and discriminating at worst.&#x201C;Why do they have to start with a prayer?&#x201D; was not an uncommon question at my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_mater?ref=chjh.nl">alma mater</a>.&#x201C;Will the male professors take off their cap&#x201D; the chair would proclaim without hesitation, leaving non-male professors clearly and logically confused.Being in the audience, there is time to think and criticize these things. There is no pressure on attending, and honestly, not every defense is as interesting. Not because of skill of the PhD candidate though. Some of the topics simply went way over my head; sometimes the committee asked trivial questions. Questions that were so generic you could predict them based on who was in the committee alone.Sometimes, all I could do was to think about how an institute&#x2019;s banal regulations shape the life event of another. A PhD is protocolled from its inception, planning, through to its closing. Oddly enough, the banality of it made me so bored, it was the perfect motivation to make terse legal documents interesting to me all of a sudden. Like when I read the bleach or soap stickers on the toilet.During one of my boredom expeditions, I stumbled upon this clause in the regulations:<blockquote>Persons other than the members of the PhD committee present at the defense may interrogate the PhD candidate, provided they have submitted a written request [&#x2026;] at least one week in advance and been granted his permission.</blockquote>I had heard in discussions before that this existed, but I had not actually read it before. Anyone in the audience could ask questions, save they submitted them prior to the defense! I knew I wanted to ask a question at a PhD defense at least once, as an audience member.Asking a question at such an important moment means having to get intimately familiar with the person&#x2019;s work so you can ask a decent question. I joked around to ask a banal question, but never seriously wanted to do that. That would be bullying. It would also be rather obnoxious to do this out of the blue, because I know I tend to ask intense questions (and a defense can be nerve-wracking). So, I asked around with people who&#x2019;s defense was coming up. "How would you feel if I submitted a question?"I only wanted to do this with consent &#x2014; and I got it in 2017. "Heck yeah, that's fun!" one of my colleagues responded. I latched on to that yes and got going. In preparation, I read the entire dissertation, and formulated my question thoughtfully and seriously. I was fairly proud, because it was not my domain of expertise to begin with. The candidate told me the general idea behind my question was interesting (I did not disclose the exact question).In a more than timely fashion, I sent my question a month in advance to the Director of the Graduate School. All I got back was the following:<blockquote>This regulation is not meant for questions from the audience. You may not ask your question and the regulations will be amended to reflect that.</blockquote><hr>The regulation for questions from the audience does not say on what grounds permission may be declined. As a result, that decision can be incredibly arbitrary and may still be valid. What "Persons other than the members of the PhD committee present" means if not also the audience, I do not know.The PhD regulations did not provide any appeal procedures for this specific scenario. All appeals related to the PhD candidate directly, not to third parties who wanted to apply those same regulations. It felt like the rules were applied arbitrarily and to the convenience of those wielding them. But because this story was intertwined with several other stories from my PhD, I decided to leave it. I did not have the energy to push this.To this day, the regulation has not been amended (I checked). If you are at my alma mater and want to ask a question as an audience member: Check out <a href="https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/sites/default/files/download/Promotiereglement%20Tilburg%20University_ENG.pdf?ref=chjh.nl">Article 9.4.5</a> and let me know how it goes &#x1F609;

When there are rules, who decides what they are intended for and how they are applied?

Arbitrary application of arbitrary rules

<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-blue"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">These are prepared remarks for the Choice Hackathon on March 18th, 2023. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz0_aPICfTk&ref=chjh.nl">Find the recording on YouTube</a>.</div></div><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1633277193619-a73de6c5701b?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHBhdHJpYXJjaHl8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjc5MzAwNDg2&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="Gender gaps as symptoms of patriarchy">When we think of gender gaps in academia or society more broadly, we may think of very specific issues. But gender gaps are mere symptoms, with a common cause: The patriarchy. This is a system where maleness ultimately dominates, at the cost of everyone.A concrete, quantified gender gap could be the wage differences between men and women. <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Gender_pay_gap_statistics&ref=chjh.nl">In Germany, where I live, it is 18%. In Romania, where you live, it is 4%</a>.Another concrete gender gap, more specific to academia, is attrition of women throughout the career ladder. Despite the almost equal start for students, the gender gap widens over the course of a career. At the end of the career ladder, there&#x2019;s three men for every one women professors. If we resolve this gap, it however does not mean maleness has been overcome - massculine traits may simply spill over into the women who make it to full professor (a type of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee_syndrome?ref=chjh.nl">queen bee behavior</a>).<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-18-at-10.45.45.png" class="kg-image" alt="Gender gaps as symptoms of patriarchy" loading="lazy" width="2000" height="1798" srcset="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w600/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-18-at-10.45.45.png 600w, https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w1000/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-18-at-10.45.45.png 1000w, https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w1600/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-18-at-10.45.45.png 1600w, https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-18-at-10.45.45.png 2002w" sizes="(min-width: 720px) 720px"><figcaption>The gender gap in positions in academia. Source: <a href="https://www.lnvh.nl/monitor2022/EN.html?ref=chjh.nl">The Dutch Network of Women Professors</a>.</figcaption></figure>Another concrete quantified gender gap is the percentage of board members that aren&#x2019;t men. The EU wants <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/statement_22_7074?ref=chjh.nl">40% of board members to be non-male by 2026</a>, but will that mean they are less male in their behavior too? What is required of non-male folk to become a part of those boards? The gender gap goes deeper than the identity, it goes to behavior. We internalize power into how we act and what we believe is right - there is plenty of internalized sexism going around.What I am trying to hint at here is that gender gaps tend to be helpful in quantifying differences, but when there are no more numeric differences, it does not mean there are no more qualitative differences. Are people able to be who they are in these spaces? Or are they conforming to the expectations of gender stereotypes?This is where I&#x2019;d like to introduce the concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doing_gender?ref=chjh.nl">&#x201C;Doing gender.&#x201D;</a>In this concept, gender is nothing but a social performance. We construct our gender by how we behave. Sex assigned at birth only assigns the expectation of a role.If we say somebody is being assertive, you may be more likely to imagine a man. If somebody&#x2019;s caring for a person, you may be more likely to imagine a woman.Likewise, in academia, the person speaking too much in a meeting is more likely to be a man. Establishing dominance and assertivity are masculine traits after all. The note taker and people organizer, making sure everyone is heard and tended to, is more likely to be a woman. Women are more likely to be unconsciously assigned this role.This is the real, everyday and practical consequences of what it means to do gender.To close gender gaps, we need to look beyond merely the numbers into what we do on an everyday basis. If we look only at the numbers, we will just start a game of whack-a-mole: Address one thing for another to pop up. How do we start undoing male dominance? More practically: What can you do to affect this?<hr>Gender gaps indicate sexism, but misogyny is the policing of those gaps so that they stay or widen.The philosopher Kate Manne, in her book <a href="http://www.katemanne.net/down-girl.html?ref=chjh.nl">Down Girl</a>, explains misogyny as the act of punishing women who challenge male dominance &#x2014; the patriarchy. Through that, we can see misogyny in practice easily.Take for example, the history of #MeToo in academia, the time where many victims of sexual harassment finally felt capable to speak up about what happened to them.Many male professors indicated that, as a result, they would no longer supervise or meet with women students one on one. They wanted to prevent sexual harassment allegations, ultimately against themselves. This is not a genuine concern about women&#x2019;s well-being. If they were genuinely concerned, they &#xA0;would listen to women, instead of centring their own perspective.Within Kate Manne&#x2019;s framework, professors denying supervision to women is easy to be seen as misogyny - the punishing of individual women for women as a whole speaking up about sexual harassment. It reinforces the gender gap of speaking out against injustice.And the lists of punishment go on and on: Speak up about sexism, and you are more likely to be seen as a trouble maker, and ultimately fired.Just last week, professor Susanne T&#xE4;uber was <a href="https://deeplink.rechtspraak.nl/uitspraak?id=ECLI%3ANL%3ARBNNE%3A2023%3A854&ref=chjh.nl">legally (!) fired from their Dutch University</a>, for raising concerns regarding social safety, including around sexist behavior. The university said prof T&#xE4;uber disrupted the employment relationship - and punished their behavior by firing them. Misogyny in practice, among many other things.<hr>Misogyny ensures gender gaps stay. But when we talk about gender gaps as a whole, we often get stuck in a binary. Man. Woman. What about everyone else?If gender is a social performance, if we do gender, then that means we are not restricted to two roles. We can generate new roles and new genders for ourselves. This is where discussion of many gender gaps break down, because it is not even being quantified.Transgender folk, non-binary folk, they cannot even start to perform their role, to do their gender, because of the policing going on to maintain the binary. I experience it almost every day: Forms that do not have any other options than man or woman. The pressure to gender based on your name &#x2014; the letters full of &#x201C;Dear Sir&#x201D; when I have never even disclosed to them I am a sir, madame, or anything else.Academia has a big problem with gender beyond the binary. When people are <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-83617-7?ref=chjh.nl">redoing gender</a>, they are simply erased, ignored, or punished. Take for example the issue of research on gender. Much research now exists to study and quantify gender differences, to help identify gender gaps, which is in a way, a good thing. In order to do that though, they have to determine the gender - something you cannot do without asking people, except if you resort to simply assigning it for them. If gender is a social role, assigning it is an act of male dominance in and of itself - taking the authority to assign it.And this is exactly what many studies do: Assign gender. Researchers use algorithms to pretend they can get an objective gender assignment, hiding behind statistics. My name is Chris, so I am likely to be a man because most other people named Chris identify as man. There is not even an option for that to be non-binary, trans, or anything else at this point. The research then only identifies gender gaps between men and women, creating a much too simple model. What are the more complex gender gaps? Those that go beyond the binary and allow us to understand more deeply the interaction between identifying with the sex assigned at birth, also called cis gender, and being trans?By assigning gender as a binary, the gender stays in a binary.We do not even get to see the gender gaps that go beyond the binary - let alone truly start addressing how male dominance limits gender equality beyond the binary either.All to say, gender gaps are real, yes.Removing gender gaps in the numbers, however, does not remove the gender gaps in practice. We live in a male dominated society - from systems, to people, to the individual traits and behaviors. The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/mar/06/antonio-guterres-un-general-assembly-gender-equality?ref=chjh.nl">secretary general of the United Nations said</a> it will take another 300 years to reach gender equality at the current pace - but that&#x2019;s only in the numbers. At this pace, it may take another 3000 years for it to go beyond the numbers, if we don&#x2019;t start picking up the pace and struggling for it harder.

In this post, I share some thoughts on gender gaps in academia and society more broadly.

Gender gaps as symptoms of patriarchy

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1624789443801-2ef65248c665?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDIyfHxnZW5kZXJ8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjc2MDI0Nzkw&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="My ongoing gender journey">I used to think I was a man&#x2019;s man and heterosexual &#x2014; but why?Where I grew up there was little public exposure beyond the traditional gender roles and heteronormative behaviors. As a kid, for example, I could have been convinced it was completely normal that my elementary school teacher tried to convert my left-handed writing, because it supposedly was a sign of the devil (anno 1999 in a Catholic region). Luckily, my mom thought it was ridiculous and let me do my thing.At my high school, a few gay people were publicly out, but I was still trying so hard to fit in and be accepted that it didn&#x2019;t even occur to me to explore my gender or my sexuality. Like so many in this world, I was bullied in elementary and in high school, making me feel left out of the experiences so many of the people around me seemed to be having. I vividly remember getting threatened for some mundane thing only adolescents would threaten somebody over. In an attempt to find some purpose, I resorted to identifying with my societally assigned gender: What being a man meant to me.The lure of identifying with masculinity was strong, straightforward, and societally accepted. The cis resources are plentifold &#x2014; websites like &#x201C;the Art of Manliness&#x201D;, "the Bro Code", or videos told me what it meant to be a traditional, cis man in modern times. They provided solace and affiliation but at a cost. Spoiler alert: Lots of those resources promoted toxic masculinity, even if in a modern jacket.In hindsight, I was desperate to find validation and affection. Cisgender norms provided me with a structure to validate myself. Heteronormativity and raging hormones meant I directed my need for affection outward. I remember having crushes on girls left and right, not understanding that it had more to do with the affection I lacked for myself than the affection they gave me.As I went from adolescence to young adulthood, I slowly started understanding myself more and more as I physically and emotionally moved on from the area I grew up in. It was like I was not just moving on from that time period, but that I was also moving from the embodied feelings associated with those points in space-time.At university as a twenty-something, I (of course) still struggled with finding a purpose, but I slowly started to understand that I had been forcing myself into boxes that need not be. I found ways to become more comfortable with myself, through finding my own competencies, regardless of the identity others ascribed to me. After struggling with many superficial friendships, I was able to find the relational depth I needed. Breaking out of boxes has been a slow process occurring gradually for a decade, which I was unable to acknowledge for a long time due to unnoticable minimal differences. The insights came at the time I was ready for them, I like to think.All that to say that only some years ago, I became comfortable to explore and say I am bisexual.All that to say that over the past years, I have been becoming more knowledgable and comfortable to let go of gender expectations. I&#x2019;ve become more comfortable exploring my gender, and overall how I want to be, instead of who I am expected to be. Even in that journey, I have had expectations as to my identity (gay people expecting I&#x2019;m gay). The only terminology I really have found some affiliation with is queer. It&#x2019;s many things at once, and ambiguous from the start.In a process of unlearning, I become even better at what I have come to be real good at: Be my own voice of reason for radical change.Some people reading this may not even know some of the things I write in here because I actively did not share. In an individualized society we are still products of the complex collective systems we find ourselves in &#x2014; me not sharing is more because of how we are all products of our society rather than anything that has to do just with you specifically.This journey of understanding is not solely one I observed on my own. It has been inspired by the many other people sharing their gender journey and showcasing that our boxes can be presents in which we find ourselves. The increased visibility of LGBTQIA+ helped me go on my own journey as the information is right there for the interested to find. If people are interested, I am happy to share some of the resources that helped me at a future time. Thank you to all the ancestors who came before me, and created the resources that are helping me find my presents.<hr>I started writing this blog as an introduction for a completely different topic. I did not realize I wanted to tell this story until I wrote it. I&#x2019;ll follow up later with the topic I actually wanted to write about: My increasing frustrations with those researchers who assign gender in their studies.

I used to think I was a man&#x2019;s man and heterosexual &#x2014; but why?Where I grew up there was little public exposure beyond the traditional gender roles and heteronormative behaviors. As a kid, for...

My ongoing gender journey

<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-grey"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">This is a post in a series of Stories From My PhD. For background on this series, <a href="https://www.chjh.nl/revisiting-my-phd/">read the announcement post</a>.</div></div><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1626005600953-fb5538488270?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDEzfHxjdWx0aXZhdGV8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjc2NjM3NjIy&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="Committing to an Ethics Code">As a researcher you are bound to uphold certain standards of conduct.When I defended my PhD, I was reminded of that rather explicitly with the following statement before being awarded my degree:<blockquote>You acquire hereby all the rights that by law or custom, are made or will be attached to the doctorate. Apart from rights, the doctorate also comes with obligations. These first of all include the execution of research and all scholarly activities with utmost integrity.</blockquote><blockquote>The privilege of being a doctor also entails that society needs to be able to rely on the sound and independent judgment of those holding a doctorate.</blockquote>This statement was only introduced in the past decade, but I think a reminder like this is a simple and effective idea. After all, it is a serious responsibility to have a PhD. Things proclaimed by people with a Dr. in front of their name are taken more seriously, whether we like it or not &#x2014; whether they are correct or not.Academic institutions hold the burden to uphold that integrity. This story, based on real events, showcases one instance of how that was done. This Story from my PhD is edited to focus on the events, not the people involved.<hr>On a day like every other, I sat behind my computer and worked on statistical analyses, bantered on email, and created memes to make life fun. Every too often, I would get up to visit the vending machine overlooking the forest. This day would be interestingly different.&#x201C;Ping!&#x201D; the email client chimed.&#x201C;We request you to fill in a declaration confirming your your commitment to academic integrity.&#x201D;It looked like it was an internal announcement and I confusedly asked my office mates whether they got this message as well.&#x201C;Lemme check&#x2026;&#x201D; they responded stoicly.Before long, there was some chatter in the hallways. Everyone on our floor received this email. It would not take long to discover everyone on all floors, in all buildings received it.&#x201C;Acting with integrity is the foundation of sound and reliable academic practice. We greatly value compliance with these principles. You are expected to observe the Ethics Code and we request that you make a declaration confirming your commitment to academic integrity.&#x201D;People ended up giggling about this at lunch. &#x201C;Of course we are committed to integrity!&#x201D; was the common feeling. Even those who may not have been committed would need to proclaim this now.Most people signed, no matter how obvious it sounded. I did not sign it, thinking it was simply another bureaucratic shenanigan like so many, which would fizzle out with no consequences.&#x201C;Do this!&#x201D;&#x201C;Why?&#x201D;&#x201C;Because we say so.&#x201D;Is it ethical to justify things only because of the power to &#xA0;be able to proclaim something needs to happen? It felt like a rather empty request.During the following weeks, I heard more about this initiative by chance when I attended a talk on research integrity by a professor from my university.&#x201C;We are requiring all employees to sign a statement affirming their commitment to the Ethics Code&#x201D; the professor proclaimed proudly and to my surprise.After the talk, I found them sipping a coffee and asked: &#x201C;Did you mean that, that it is a requirement?&#x201D; &#x201C;I haven&#x2019;t signed it yet and I was not aware it was required.&#x201D;&#x201C;You understand that after recent events, we need to step up" the professor argued. "We need to make it clear that we do not tolerate unethical conduct.&#x201D;I nodded along as the dutiful PhD student is expected to when talking to a professor known to not be the most considerate to begin with.&#x201C;I strongly urge you to sign it, otherwise we may need to take steps. Most people already signed, so just come along. It may result in negative consequences if you don&#x2019;t.&#x201D; The professor's words did not feel as urgent as they might have been intended. Most people clicked the link, checked the box, and pressed submit. They declared their commitment to the Ethics Code. I cannot blame them &#x2014; it is the path of least resistance. &#x201C;Who am I to say no? I don&#x2019;t want to have to deal with this&#x201D; is a thought I have to constantly fight against.I also supported the Ethics Code, but what was happening here was not a commitment. It was following orders. Weeks would pass with me not signing.&#x201C;A month ago we sent you a request to fill in a declaration confirming your commitment to academic integrity. You have not yet entered such confirmation. This possibly has slipped your mind. We kindly request you to take this action in the next two weeks&#x201D; a follow up email told me.Things came together when I read that email. Hours later, with some more research under my belt on (pan-)university policies and my own employment contract, I replied.&#x201C;Thanks for the reminder&#x201D; I started off. &#x201C;I don&#x2019;t really understand why this explicit request is necessary, and why it is not communicated as a requirement if it is in fact required.&#x201D;&#x201C;The Ethics Code itself states&#x201D; I continued, &#x201C;that all universities are bound by it. My employment contract also states this already. Declaring my commitment would result in the same situation as is already the case.&#x201D;I finished with an invitation. &#x201C;I would like to talk about the origins and goals of this measure, so I can make an informed decision about what to do. Research ethics is a daily topic for me, as it is part of my specialization.&#x201D;This apparently was a reason to escalate.&#x201C;Legally an employee may not refuse a reasonable request from the employer, unless they&#x2019;re looking for a problem in the employment relation, with the most severe consequence getting fired.&#x201D;&#x201C;You say you support the Ethics Code. Can't you just sign it then?&#x201D;After some back and forth veiled by the spectre of getting fired and the accompanying stress for a PhD candidate, I received the answer I was looking for all along:<blockquote>The Ethics Code is not well known. Signing a commitment declaring support for the Ethics Code provides legal certainty to fire somebody when necessary.</blockquote><hr>I am in favor of upholding integrity, yet this approach felt like it missed the mark. It felt like a bureaucrat's straightforward solution to a much more complex issue. Some might say, better than nothing &#x2014; what does a commitment mean if it has to be made when the weight of an institution starts coming down on you, really? This approach was a choice to solve a problem &#x2014; and I wonder whether they actually did solve the problem in the end. It of course depends on the problem they defined at the start.

How can we cultivate a culture of ethical conduct? A story on one approach that may not have achieved a richer culture.

Committing to an Ethics Code

<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-purple"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">This is an idea I've toyed around with for a few years, but never wrote down. I would love to hear your feedback!</div></div><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1611075384322-731537ad7971?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fGV4Y2VsbGVuY2V8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjc1MDI3MTYx&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating">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. This despite longstanding evidence that this form of publication bias reduces the validity of findings drastically.
Another perverse incentive is the notion of &#x201C;excellence&#x201D; in a competitive landscape. It seems logical: Select the best to get the best. That it seems logical, does not make this logic consistent with reality. In this blog I outline why selecting for excellence is self-defeating, and you do not end up with the best by trying to select for the best.
By most practical definitions, excellence is reserved for the few. The excellent are the cream of the crop. As such, excellence is most often defined relatively. Consider this scenario: If there are a 100 people, the top ten performing people could be considered the excellent ones.<a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a>
Beyond an alleged means to select the best, selecting for excellence also bakes in exclusivity, scarcity, and inflated value. Even if hypothetically every single one of the 100 people could be considered excellent to some degree, selecting for excellence often means only the top remain &#x2014; in this case the top ten. Ninety people would be excluded, the work that they could produce is removed from the equation, and the value of the remaining ten is higher because of lower supply.
By selecting for excellence, we create a form of professional Darwinism. This is self-perpetuating, because the absolute performance does not matter. Even if you would be considered one of the top ten performers five years ago, maybe you do not make the cut today. No matter how good your absolute performance is, you need to prove your relative worth. This means that not only does selecting for excellence bake in exclusivity, scarcity, and inflated value; it also creates the ambiguous condition where your previous &#x201C;excellence&#x201D; is no guarantee in the future, in essence gaslighting yourself about how good you actually are. This strongly goes against the mental health advise to not compare your performance with other&#x2019;s, as it can be (severely) detrimental.<a href="#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a>
<h2 id="naive-realism">Naive realism</h2>
At the bottom of the line, selecting for excellence adheres to a naive realist philosophy: The results you get are 100% accurate. There are no false positives, there are no false negatives. Because somebody gets selected as excellent, they become, by definition, excellent. In this world, what we observe becomes real instead of our observations trying to reflect the real.
Fact of the matter is, none of the methods to assess relative excellence are that good. Even if the method with which we could unambiguously rank order people for the skill in question, we would have the problem that we do not know the distribution of what we are selecting upon. If there is a large gap between the so-called &#x201C;excellent&#x201D; and the &#x201C;non-excellent,&#x201D; then it might work. If there is a continuous increase of skill as we go up &#x201C;the excellence hierarchy,&#x201D; simple error will cause us to make mistakes. A person could be &#x201C;more excellent&#x201D; than someone else, but the measurement error on that occasion could make them &#x201C;less excellent&#x201D;<a href="#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a> and potentially miss the cut. Arbitrary cut-offs can result in arbitrary results.
<h2 id="base-rate-fallacy">Base rate fallacy</h2>
Which brings us to the fundamental theoretical problem of selecting for excellence. At its core, the problem is the same as the base rate fallacy caused by the low prevalence of excellence. If only the top 10% are considered excellent, it means the prevalence is 10%.
Let us consider a very optimistic scenario. In our decisions, we only have 1% false positives (&#x237A;; &#x201C;non-excellent&#x201D; designated as &#x201C;excellent&#x201D;) and 90% true positives (1-&#x3B2;; &#x201C;excellent&#x201D; as &#x201C;excellent&#x201D;). That would result in a positive predictive value (PPV), the chances of &#x201C;excellent&#x201D; being &#x201C;correct&#x201D;, of 91%. I calculate below using N=100.
<img src="https://ucarecdn.com/25da6149-9b8e-4af0-bf2d-be91390e9d29/" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating" loading="lazy"><a href="#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a>
In a visual representation, that could look like this:
<img src="https://ucarecdn.com/f3aaa63f-a5e4-4143-905e-af096b51b2d4/" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating" loading="lazy">
You could say, not too bad &#x2014; but remember this is the best case scenario! In the best case scenario, just shy of 1 out of 10 people will not get the career opportunities they supposedly deserve under the excellence framework. This can have all kinds of downstream consequences (housing, relationships, mental health). Again: This is the best scenario I will be offering here!
We can switch out the rates in our scenario quite easily to take less optimistic scenario&#x2019;s. If we take the basic error rate for false positives, often set at 5%, only 2 out of 3 people selected as excellent would be considered correctly selected.
<img src="https://ucarecdn.com/14168e63-221e-4110-b0bd-15f654745556/" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating" loading="lazy">
Which in visual terms could look like this:
<img src="https://ucarecdn.com/091c8578-eb5e-4e0c-a35b-ef20887abda4/" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating" loading="lazy">
Again, this means that people&#x2019;s livelihoods depend on a measure that fails 1 out of 3 times. This is still a rather optimistic scenario --- we can also get more pessimistic, in terms of selection pressures.
Imagine a world ten years down the line. Researchers still want to get tenure. The government has kept funds for researchers at parity levels and did not substantively increase them to increase capacity. However, the amount of researchers seeking tenure has increased, because of the higher amount of graduate candidates. As a result, competition increased and only the top 1% is considered excellent, instead of top 10%.
<img src="https://ucarecdn.com/8785b2ad-7c05-429e-8a80-6d63f837bc03/" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating" loading="lazy">
When looking at the visuals it seems like a fruitless exercise, with more mistakes than anything else.
<img src="https://ucarecdn.com/f040507d-4fe4-46e9-870f-857489a1e11a/" alt="The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating" loading="lazy">
In this scenario, selecting for excellence fails for 17 out of 20 researchers (85%). Selecting for excellence fails 17 out of 20 people&#x2019;s lives and livelihoods. People who may have moved to another country for this opportunity, who may have all kinds of circumstances that create additional stress on their lives. Would it not be unacceptable to use this as a reliable mechanism to make career and life altering decisions? Unethical?
Of course, we can never know the reality of this excellence mechanism. I call it naive realism, others may simply say it is realism. All probability theory would tell us is that even in the best case scenarios selecting for excellence fails; in worse cases it fails miserabley &#x2014; especially as excellence becomes an ever more exclusive concept.
<h2 id="what-to-do">What to do?</h2>
It could be straightforward: Reduce selection pressures. Of course university budgets matter; of course the number of graduate students matter. So many things matter, but at the end of the day all of these play into what the selection pressures are, and we must reduce them.
Even if we do not reduce the pressures, we must at least keep the same capacity. Without available resources growing at least at the same rate as the pool of candidates (whether that is funding, journal space, or otherwise), we will get even higher selection pressures. If capacity is not kept at parity, selection pressures will grow.
Better than keeping things at parity is to widen the pool of people to consider excellent. We would be way better off to select for what is good enough, rather than for what is excellent. What if good enough is the top 30%, instead of the excellent top 10%? We would approach the best case scenario very quickly with a positive predictive value of 89%.
A practice like selecting for excellence, but outside of academia, is called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve?ref=chjh.nl">"rank and yank."</a> It caused much trouble for companies like Microsoft over th years until they discontinued it in 2013. Yet, in academia ranking and yanking thrives on all levels to everybody's discontent and the failure of its purpose.
In a future blog post I will evaluate journal rejection rates in light of the excellence paradox. Stay tuned!
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item">Absolute excellence can exist too, if the rule to define excellence is strictly defined. Because in most research situations excellence is highly ambiguous, I consider relative excellence as the primary form of excellence that is of interest. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2" class="footnote-item">Someone is always going to be better than you in one specific thing, even if they are not performing as well as you on all the things you do! <a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3" class="footnote-item">Talking about excellence makes very little sense to me, as I notice in writing this. <a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
<li id="fn4" class="footnote-item">Sorry for the screenshots. I tried embedding the formulae directly and it got real messy &#x1F614; If anybody knows how to properly embed LaTeX in Ghost CMS, I'd love to hear! <a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">&#x21A9;&#xFE0E;</a>
</li>
</ol>
</section>

Does it really make sense to select only the best? I explore how excellence is self-defeating from a theoretical probability perspective.

The Excellence Paradox: Selecting for excellence is self-defeating

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1666786881194-7ecf6f620375?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDI4fHxDb21wb3VuZHxlbnwwfHx8fDE2NzQyMDM4MDg&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="The joy of compounding skillsets">Starting a small company means the buck stops with me on everything, every time. Since founding Liberate Science three years ago, that means I&#x2019;ve had to pick up a lot of skills. Where there is a gap, I either need to fill it myself or find someone to fill it.Trained as a social psychologist turned applied statistician and meta-researcher, I now also know things about software engineering, design, community management, social media management, bookkeeping, business development, and much more. I love learning - so my curiosity is very content!This generalist approach means I am also in no way an expert in many of these topics, which I am okay with. The idea of experts is overrated anyway, as deferring to someone because of their expertise status is an ad hominem &#x2014; it elevates the person above the content. In the past, I struggled with my self confidence as a generalist, in a world that encourages specialists. The whole idea that you need to be a specialist in your field, aim to be the best, made me put a lot of pressure on myself. &#x201C;Jack of all trades, master of none&#x201D; as the saying goes diminished my feelings of self-worth.After reading books like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph_in_a_Specialized_World?ref=chjh.nl">Range</a>, I have come to think about my skillset as compounding.If you are a a specialist, you may be the one person out of a million people with that level of skill mastery. This is fantastic of course! It takes a lot of effort to get there, as over time marginal increases in your skill require ever more time (also known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns?ref=chjh.nl">law of diminishing returns</a>). Examples can be piano players, professional athletes, or other domains that require specialization by definition.If you are a generalist, you may have multiple skills that are used together to compound into your unique perspective. Like me: I may be one out of 10,000 people in my skill of applied statistics and one out of 10,000 in software engineering. Combined, those two skillsets provide me with a perspective that only one out of 10,000,000 people have! Add more skillsets, and the compounding effect grows even more.The only downside is that this only applies when the skills can actually be compounded. My knowledge about drilling holes in the wall does not help with publishing (I think). This means that you have to let yourself be surprised by the combinations and be okay with having skillsets that are potentially irrelevant to your work. Let yourself be surprised &#x2014; maybe it was about drilling holes in paywalls all along.I do not pressure myself to be a specialist anymore &#x2014; being a generalist keeps me both humble about my reasoning, and also gives me the confidence that I have a unique perspective to provide and contribute. What are some of your compounding skills? I would love to know in the comments below.

Being a generalist makes you more unique then you think!

The joy of compounding skillsets

As a recovered academic, I feel comfortable writing some stories I have not shared before.

"Stories from my PhD" series

<div class="kg-card kg-callout-card kg-callout-card-yellow"><div class="kg-callout-emoji">&#x1F4A1;</div><div class="kg-callout-text">These are my remarks for the junior researcher panel at the <a href="https://berlinstitute.org/ape2023/?ref=chjh.nl">APE2023 conference</a>. This blog is slightly edited for clarity and expands the quote selection from Aaron Swartz.</div></div><img src="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2023/01/Academic-Publishing-Europe_logo_Tekengebied-1-768x452.jpg" alt="Remarks for the Berlin Publishing Conference 2023">Aaron Swartz died a decade ago today - to commemorate him I&#x2019;ll start by reading selected quotes from <a href="https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto">the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto</a> here today.<blockquote>Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. [&#x2026;] Sharing isn't immoral &#x2014; it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. [&#x2026;] corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it &#x2014; their shareholders would revolt at anything less. [&#x2026;] We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. [&#x2026;] With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge &#x2014; we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?</blockquote>I would argue to reframe publishing as a question of power &#x2014; as Aaron talked about it: Information is power.We talked about business models, the value in data, and other opportunities at this conference. But without also talking about the power dimension I would argue we miss the why. We will miss the framework with which to understand the problems we are trying to solve.When publishers negotiate contracts, non-disclosures are about negotiation power.&#x201C;Publishers are sitting on a goldmine of data&#x201D; someone said this morning. The power of tracking.<a href="https://akademienl.social/@chartgerink/109670707031255522?ref=chjh.nl">We just heard</a> about how privacy improvements are bad for publisher&#x2019;s access management.Yesterday, I heard jokingly say &#x201C;Elsevier tracks everything&#x201D;, which reminds me of the power created by data brokering, which some of the parent companies of publishers do.For researchers, your &#xA0;publishing business is not relevant. The power dynamics are.It is why I am a reluctant publisher myself - as a researcher I wanted do something about those power dynamics in publishing, no matter how small.In 1989, 20% of people thought the wall would fall in the next five years. Six months later it fell. When I heard this story yesterday from J&#xF6;rg Rocholl, all I heard was that you may think people will tolerate power imbalance indefinitely, but your wall may fall if you push it too far. Researchers may take down your paywalls and much more in a similar way if you keep pushing the power imbalances.

My remarks for the junior researcher panel at the APE2023 conference.

Remarks for the Berlin Publishing Conference 2023

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1584697964358-3e14ca57658b?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDUwfHxkaXNhYmlsaXR5fGVufDB8fHx8MTY3MjM5NjE1Mw&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="Open Inaccessibility">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. After all: When a PDF is downloaded, who can read it?<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fiQry9AmfY&ref=chjh.nl">At the start of the year I discussed</a> the social model of disability and inaccessibility in relation to open scholarship, but since then I have not done much more in a practical sense. Here's the best explanation of the social model of disability I have seen:<figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card kg-card-hascaption"><iframe width="200" height="113" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0e24rfTZ2CQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen title="What is the social model of disability? - Scope video"></iframe><figcaption>An explainer video of the social model of disability. Source: <a href="https://youtu.be/0e24rfTZ2CQ?ref=chjh.nl">https://youtu.be/0e24rfTZ2CQ</a></figcaption></figure>Content inaccessibility came back on my radar again when I read <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.07286?ref=chjh.nl">a recent study about content accessibility improvements for arXiv</a>. This paper calls content accessibility "the next frontier of open science." As we see a simultaneous increase in user-generated content platforms for publishing, where there is less control over what and how things get published, I would agree and argue that accessibility will become a bigger topic quickly. Some of my main takeaways and juxtapositions from this paper include:<ul><li>There is clear content inaccessibility: only 30% of people using assistive technologies rate all research as accessible (vs. 59% of people not using assistive technologies).</li><li>HTML is preferred for accessibility, but non-disabled people prefer PDFs.</li><li>Biggest improvement areas for accessibility are (1) PDF formatting, (2) images (alt texts), (3) math accessibility (e.g., MathML for screenreaders), (4) making data in figures parseable by screen readers.</li><li>People who don't use assistive technologies don't know what is required of them to make accessible documents</li><li>PDF is often preferred because it is easy/easier to save to reference managers.</li></ul>Moreover, this study evaluated the experiences of researchers in each step of the article process. A lot of negative experiences happen at each step, indicating there is ample room for improvement. Accessibility is helpful for everyone in the end.<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-30-at-11.33.25.png" class="kg-image" alt="Open Inaccessibility" loading="lazy" width="2000" height="773" srcset="https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w600/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-30-at-11.33.25.png 600w, https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w1000/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-30-at-11.33.25.png 1000w, https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w1600/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-30-at-11.33.25.png 1600w, https://www.chjh.nl/content/images/size/w2400/2022/12/Screenshot-2022-12-30-at-11.33.25.png 2400w" sizes="(min-width: 720px) 720px"><figcaption><a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.07286?ref=chjh.nl">Original Figure 1.</a> The stacked bar chart shows the percent of positive vs. negative experiences at each step in the user journey.</figcaption></figure>I wonder though, how HTML pairs up with other technologies like XML, which this study did not dive into.<h2 id="next-steps">Next steps</h2>This study on content accessibility on arXiv is a great example of how to engage and with mindful intent start moving the needle forward. It inspires me to take some next steps as well. I am a non-disabled person, so my forgetfulness about this topic is a reminder of my privilege to not have these issues on a day-to-day basis. It also highlights the importance of actively doing something about it, as not doing anything is bad enough to promote the status quo. Practically and specifically, I will implement <a href="https://www.crossref.org/blog/accessibility-for-crossref-doi-links-call-for-comments-on-proposed-new-guidelines/?ref=chjh.nl">accessible DOIs</a> into ResearchEquals upon my return next week. I also recognize I am fairly ignorant on disability studies and activism, so I am starting that journey by making these the first books I read in 2023:<ol><li>Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (by Alice Wong)</li><li>Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life (by Alice Wong)</li><li>I'll figure it out: How ableism impacts disabled people's lives (by Marina Carlos)</li></ol>If this topic of inaccessibility and ableism was new to you, what are your thoughts? I would love for people to explore this area more in 2023 and share in each other's journeys! Book recommendations welcome too &#x1F60A;

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...

Open Inaccessibility

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1655635949348-953b0e3c140a?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDl8fDNkfGVufDB8fHx8MTY3MTcxNzc1MQ&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="Dipping my toes into 3D">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. So I'm happy to chat about how I've been trying out 3D design &#x2013; as an experiment to see what is feasible for an amateur like me.Honestly, I have come to realise 3D may actually be easier than I expected nowadays. I thought I would have to learn the infamously difficult to learn Blender software, which always put me off. I ended up trying <a href="https://spline.design/?ref=chjh.nl">Spline</a> instead and it's honestly like MS Paint for 3D.After messing around for an hour or so I was able to recreate the Einstein's Foundation award introduction. Here's the original:<figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><iframe width="200" height="113" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O1gojOdabCE?start=8&feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen title="The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research &#x2013;&#xA0;Trailer"></iframe></figure>And this is what I recreated without too much effort if I say so myself:<iframe src="https://my.spline.design/untitled-7cc53b9a2c74340dc201d989eee1f398/" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="100%"></iframe>Sure, it is not the exact same thing, I would be a bit afraid if it was. For an hour worth of rummaging in the software this is a pretty good result. It takes a bit of getting used to moving things in three dimensional space, and to understand that you can animate by transitioning smoothly between two states. So if you have thought about trying out 3D, I encourage you to try it with Spline (I did not get the paid plan for this). Hopefully I will come back next week with a bit more inspired of a post.

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...

Dipping my toes into 3D

<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1459347268516-3ed71100e718?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDF8fHByaXZhdGV8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjcwNTkzNTkx&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000" alt="Private open scholarship">A primary argument around open scholarship (i.e., open science) is that of &#x201C;publicly funded means publicly accessible.&#x201D; I don&#x2019;t like that argument because it reinforces the inverse: Privately funded means privately accessible."Privately funded means privately accessible" is especially prevalent in an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) era where patenting, copyrighting, and closing information/data down as trade secrets is commonplace. By using the "publicly funded means publicly accessible" argument we may be &#xA0;implicitly reinforcing the IPR paradigm we are in. The ideas behind open scholarship as I understand them are exactly anti-IPR though &#x2014; one where we try to make knowledge more accessible to everyone, including the power that comes with it. Hence, even implicitly promoting IPR for privately funded research as a way to forward publicly funded open scholarship is self-defeating, I would say. It also suggests that we bifurcate the standards by which we evaluate research: One set of standards for public research, one set for private research.But are we really applying different standards to publicly and privately funded research? Can we even differentiate between public and private research, really?An example where we (supposedly) apply the same standards to private and public research is when it becomes part of the scholarly literature and knowledge base. Take for example <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022819118?ref=chjh.nl">the experiment Facebook ran in 2012</a> on over half a million people. Facebook experimented with the valence of posts people saw in their feed, to study emotional contagion in people. They did not ask people for their consent, but simply argued the terms people agree to when signing up to Facebook are considered informed consent:<blockquote>
it was consistent with Facebook&#x2019;s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research
</blockquote>
You cannot provide informed consent to something without being informed about the specifics. As a result of this, an <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1412469111?ref=chjh.nl">expression of concern</a> raised a problem of this public-private distinction: Who reviews the ethics of studies done by private entities?More broadly than this example, privately funded research struggles to get legitimate ethics reviews done to begin with. For example, I am completely unable right now to get ethics reviews for my studies, because I am a privately funded researcher. There is no standard way to get ethics approval for human participant studies, which journals (technically) require nowadays. At the same time, I am still expected to apply the same principles of responsible and ethical research. I am required to do so, as not doing so would mean I am not fulfilling my doctoral duties. Public research standards apply to my privately funded work but do not get supported. See the Catch-22?It is also more and more common for those same (public) standards of responsible and ethical research to require transparency of research. It is via that route, the research culture that spans beyond any one institute, we might be able to reinforce open scholarship in privately funded research as well. But that means we must also support it - and the argument of &#x201C;publicly funded means publicly accessible&#x201D; means we forego that support by focusing on publicly funded work. If we apply the logic of privately funded research as privately accessible, it presupposes an artificial distinction between public and private research that allows for these discrepancies to take root. Let us stop this divide and do more on how to support open scholarship in both public and private institutions.

A primary argument around open scholarship (i.e., open science) is that of “publicly funded means publicly accessible.” I don’t like that argument because it reinforces the inverse: Privately funded means...