NanoBubbles in Nijmegen : a look back at our last in-person team meeting

Shortly after NanoBubbles celebrated its second anniversary, our fourth in-person seminar took place from 19 to 23 June in Ravenstein, a village near Nijmegen (Netherlands). This meeting, organised by PI Willem Halffman (Radboud University), aimed  to catch up on ongoing projects by tracing our activity since the beginning of NanoBubbles, to create more opportunities for synergy within the project, and to plan our next steps. The event was also punctuated by small visits of the Ravenstein windmill and tannery as well as nature walks.

For early arrivers, the seminar began on Monday 19 morning with a short visit of Nijmegen led by Willem Halffman, before taking the train to meet the whole group at our conference venue (once a nunnery). Soon after, the first session of the meeting covered our work in progress in the area of citations and retractions. Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé discussed sneaked references, after which Cabanac showcased a crossref-Dimensions-Netscity pipeline for the Spatial Analysis of Bibliographic Data. Finally, Yağmur Öztürk displayed a tool which could help visualising/creating maps of citation relations among scientific publications. The next couple of sessions were parallel – members had to choose between attending a data visualisation jam session led by Guillaume Levrier or a session about the project’s advancement and milestones entitled “The NanoBubbles project: Where do we stand?” led by Frédérique Bordignon.

During the second day of the seminar, team members furthermore explored the project’s work in progress, this time on promises and claims. Federico Boem discussed our post-publication peer review subproject with a session entitled “Improving nano-science through open, collaborative critical discussions”, while Maha Said gave an overview on where our replication subproject currently stands. After a short break, Martin Lentschat and Federico Boem provided a quick update on their ethics working groups on internal conduct and publishing, information sharing and attribution. This acted as a follow-up to the work initiated during our last workshop in Maastricht. After an improvised breakout room sessions and a 6 km nature walk through the Maas floodplain and farmland, team members once again had to choose between attending a training session provided by Willem Halffman on qualitative and quantitative research (more specifically when to use what and how to make them work together in social science) or a catching-up session with the project’s scientific advisory board with Elisabeth Bik, Wolfgang Parak, Kornelia Konrad and Boris Barbour in attendance online.

On day 3 of the seminar, the analysis of our work in progress followed with a focus on error correction. Frédérique Bordignon gave a session entitled “Correction of science: results from two parallel studies”, while Mady Malheiros discussed the topic of epistemic activists. After another improvised breakout group session and a guided visit by proud millers of De Nijverheid, the Ravenstein windmill, team members either attend a STS 101 training session led by Willem Halffman or catching-up session with the project’s ethics advisory board with Katleen Gabriels and Ruth Chadwick attending online, and Alfred Nordmann in the venue.

The fourth day of the seminar began with an update on our work in progress regarding journals. Marianne Noël’s session tackled “Institutionalizing chemistry through journals (1789-2018). Longevity, publication frequency, places of publication and dynamics of sub-disciplines”, while Guillaume Levrier discussed the exploration of nano journals. Later in the afternoon, team members welcomed Tim Kersjes of Springer Nature, who talked about his experience with regards to the project topics.

The fifth and final day of the seminar was dedicated to our work on annotations and replications with a session on how to identify signals of overpromising led by Stefan Gaillard and another about tracking claims in scientific literature led by Martin Lentschat. The meeting then closed with discussions about our next steps and a live demonstration of Problematic Paper Screener delivered by Guillaume Cabanac.