Critical Metascience

Metascience is not a monolith! It has many different aspects, including the fast-growing area of feminist metascience. I’ve recently discussed feminist metascience and open science on this Substack here and here, including work by Jenni Adams, Miranda Lynn Barnes, Madeleine Pownall, Elizabeth Bennett, and others. So, it’s great to see that a special issue on the topic is forthcoming in the journal Gender and Society. Munsch, C. L., & Reyes, D. V. (2026). Feminist metascience, feminist open science?

In her new paper, Sabina Leonelli discusses three forms of structural injustice associated with disparities in scientific research: (1) resource injustice, (2) focus injustice, and (3) labour injustice.

Rena Alcalay and Joachim Vandekerckhove discuss ‚Äúepistemic disadvantage in open science practices.‚ÄĚ Following Davis-Stober et al.

Hartmut Blank and colleagues ask whether preregistration protects against the hindsight bias, in which researchers perceive their results as more predictable after they are known. As Blank et al. (2026) explained: The idea that there is hindsight bias for one’s own research predictions and that preregistration is needed to protect researchers from it has been taken for granted and has become part of the Open Science folklore.

Jenni Adams, Miranda Lynn Barnes and colleagues put together a zine on feminist open science, including some quotes from Elizabeth Bennett’s (2021) article: “Open Science From a Qualitative, Feminist Perspective.” My favourite quote from Bennett (2021) is: From which position(s) is this [open science] framework speaking? Where is it located in a hierarchy of research power and epistemological dominance? Adams, J., Needham, L., Barnes, M., Givans, S., He, S., Sadler, R., Smithson, D., & X, A.

Over on Never Met a Science, Kevin Munger discusses his new preprint on “Contained and Uncontained Experiments.” Contained experiments are those for which it is plausible to “perform the same procedure” and expect “the same result.” Uncontained experiments are those for which practitioners expect intrinsic variation to dominate; even when performing the same procedure, the goal is to understand how results differ across time and context.

The Journal of Research on Research has recently been launched, with Gemma Derrick as the Editor-in-Chief, and Serge Horbach, Bart Penders, and Tony Ross-Hellauer as Editors. Why call it “research on research”? In their Editorial, Derrick et al. explain that: We have purposefully chosen a term which lays aside questions of epistemological inclusion or exclusion of contributions and instead embraces all ways of doing, knowing and understanding how research is practiced, produced and governed.

Feminist Metascience Madeleine Pownall writes about Carolyn Wood Sherif, a pioneer of feminist psychology. Carolyn Wood Sherif.

Average replicability rates Theories don’t die! Is the replication crisis overblown? Postdoctoral Fellowships Partial replications Berna Devezer and Erkan Buzbas published a preprint disputing the idea that a high average replication rate indicates a healthy literature and a low rate indicates a crisis. They argue that: Aggregating replicability rates across heterogeneous literatures produces averages that conflate incommensurable experimental regimes and lack a stable scientific interpretation.

20:20 hindsight on scientific progress Open research in the humanities The role of scientific sleuths Individual bias and collective criticism Whitney Barlow Robles looks back over the history of scientific progress and notes that a lot of it would look “unscientific” by today’s standards . . . which will look “unscientific” in the future! People sometimes look back at past scientists and ask: “Could they really have been this dumb?