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• 2026
• Stuart Buck, Josh New & Aishwarya Khanduja — Mandatory Reporting of Null Results. The Good Science Project. September 24, 2026. As the NIH and the White House signal interest in requiring null results to be reported, the authors argue for a tailored “report all meaningful results” rule: extend the clinical-trial model (preregistration, results within a year) to studies with a prespecified yes-or-no question, starting with preclinical efficacy, biomarker validation, genetic association, toxicology and protein-ligand binding research, and making NIH funding contingent on it. Hidden null results also mislead the AI tools now used to synthesise the literature.
• Industriens Fond — Giv plads til de skøre idéer. Industriens Fond. September 23, 2026. An interview with Lindsay Heil, DARPA’s director of international cooperation, after TechBBQ in Copenhagen: about 100 programme managers on time-limited contracts with a quarter replaced each year, no in-house labs, and contracts signed in months. Her warning to countries copying the model is that boards, funding committees and ministerial layers kill it; what works is a strong mission and autonomous programme managers.
• Reuters, via US News — Scientists Challenge US NIH Grant Screening as Unconstitutional. September 16, 2026. A class-action suit backed by the ACLU and the Center for Science in the Public Interest alleges NIH screens grant applications against roughly 235 flagged keywords, including “gender” and “climate change,” to identify awards for termination or forced renegotiation.
• Scholars at Risk — Free to Think 2026. September 15, 2026. Counts 382 attacks on higher-education communities across 59 countries and territories over the past year, naming the United States, Türkiye, and Georgia for partisan appointments to university governing bodies.
• Teeny et al. — The “Synthetic Validity” Problem in AI-Generated Science. PNAS. September 15, 2026. Names a subtler research-integrity failure mode than fabrication: AI-generated results that are internally coherent and statistically plausible but ungrounded in any real underlying phenomenon, harder to catch with standard fraud-detection heuristics.
• STAT News — Court Halts DHS Visa Limits on Foreign Scholars. September 14, 2026. A federal judge's preliminary injunction blocks the DHS rule ending indefinite “duration of status” for F-1 and J-1 holders, one day before it was due to take effect.
• Wellcome Trust — Wellcome Discovery Awards Eligibility Update. September 2026. From 29 October 2026 the scheme accepts lead applicants only from the UK and low- and middle-income countries in Africa, South Asia, and South-East Asia, newly excluding Danish institutions as leads.
• AIP FYI — DOJ Official Queried a Dozen Journals on Partisan Views in 2025. September 9, 2026. Newly released records show a DOJ official sent near-identical letters in April 2025 to at least eleven journals, including JAMA, NEJM, and Science, accusing them of partisanship and demanding explanations of editorial process.
• NIH — NOT-OD-26-088: Request for Information on Reporting Peer Review Outcomes. August 2026. Proposes replacing numerical impact scores and percentiles with broad tiers, “Most Competitive,” “Competitive,” and “Not Discussed,” aligned with NIH's Unified Funding Strategy; comment period runs through October 13, 2026.
• Denmark Digest — DTU Fires Climate Researcher Henrik Svensmark. July 2026. DTU dismissed the veteran space and climate physicist after nearly three decades, saying only that it is downgrading atmospheric physics; Svensmark told Berlingske he could not rule out political considerations.
• Stephen Curry (RoRI) — Meta Morsels 1. Go Meta! (Research on Research Institute). September 17, 2026. The first in an occasional RoRI series rounding up notable metascience writing, opening with Daniel Hook on AI-era “decollaboration,” Henry Farrell on how social science should think about AI, and Christopher Smith on why science policy needs context over metrics.
• Paul Litvak — We Must Understand. In One Lifetime. September 17, 2026. Makes the case for building an open evidence graph, a shared public record linking scientific claims to the evidence for and against them, as a defence against “feudal science” and the erosion of the cognitive commons, while weighing the risk that it also accelerates dangerous AI.
• Forskerforum — Fire ud af fem forskere ville ændre deres forskning med fri finansiering. Forskerforum (DM). September 2026. Danish coverage of the CFA Forskningslandskabet report: 79% of researchers say they would shift their research interests given two years of unconstrained funding, and three in four say current grant formats constrain how they would ideally work.
• UKRI — UKRI Modernises Grant Assessment for the Age of AI. September 10, 2026. An eight-measure overhaul, effective October 2026, to speed funding decisions and respond to generative AI's effect on both grant writing and peer review, part of a July 2026 pledge to halve grant-processing time by 2031.
• Andrew Gerard — Kyle Myers on the Direction of Science. Macroscience. September 10, 2026. A writeup of an IFP Economics of Ideas lecture on how funders steer science: the economics of grants, prizes, patents and contracts, disease-group lobbying and soft earmarks at the NIH, how review noise distorts grant budgets, and the cost of steering scientists toward new directions.
• Stuart Buck & Kushal Kadakia — Investing in the Science of Science: What Medicare Can Teach the NIH About Experimentation. The Good Science Project. September 10, 2026. A reprint of a 2022 Health Affairs piece, newly relevant as agencies stand up metascience offices, arguing the NIH needs a statutory mandate and protected funding to experiment on its own grantmaking, modelled on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
• Orin Herskowitz, Kyle McEneaney & Kumar Garg — Building the Bridge from Innovation to Impact: Philanthropy’s Unique Role. SCI PHI (Renaissance Philanthropy). September 10, 2026. Argues that promising innovations die between lab result and patient benefit, where no market incentive funds validation, regulation and adoption, and that philanthropy, uniquely free of market and statutory constraints, should act as a systems integrator across the whole innovation-to-impact bridge, with examples from the SMA Foundation, Rare As One, Convergent Research’s FROs and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
• Mark Rubin — Is Replication Rare? Registered Report Timelines, Open Science and Trust, P-Hacking and Publication Bias. Critical Metascience. September 7, 2026. A roundup arguing replication looks rare or common depending on definition (direct replications are rare, conceptual ones and unlabelled “micro-replications” are not), alongside new work on registered-report timelines, whether open-science cues raise public trust, and how fast versus slow p-hacking interact with publication bias.
• Lars Bo Nielsen (Villum Fonden) — Vi har brug for flere veje fra forskning til handling. Science Report. September 5, 2026. Villum Fonden’s director argues Denmark must both protect curiosity-driven basic research and build more bridges from discovery to application, and says the foundation is raising innovation in its grant strategy, citing Spin-outs Denmark (a new DKK 115M phase) and the Green X Accelerator (DKK 80M). Innovation, he argues, is society’s ability to turn knowledge into solutions, more than a measure of growth.
• Andrew Gerard, Jenn Gustetic et al. — What We’ve Been Reading, Vol. 2. Macroscience. September 4, 2026. The IFP metascience team’s reading roundup, spanning the fight over NSF social-science funding, a “tragedy of the cognitive commons” as AI erodes entry-level expertise, AI agents and the validation bottleneck in science, cancer vaccines, and why AI RCTs must evolve to stay useful.
• Kyle Cranmer, Neil D. Lawrence, Jessica Montgomery & Denis Thérien — AI for Science: Reframing AI’s Role in Discovery. RSS Data Science and AI. September 2026. A framework for how AI actually contributes to science, organised around task capabilities, workflow integration and domain constraints, opening deeper questions: whether AI-built knowledge counts as scientific understanding if it is impenetrable to humans, what it would take to move AI beyond pattern-matching toward causal reasoning, and what institutional changes responsible adoption requires. Opens a call for papers from RSS Data Science and AI.
• Phillip J. Haubrock et al. — How Contemporary Academic Structures Constrain Scientific Creativity and Hold Back Early-Career Researchers. Nature Human Behaviour. September 3, 2026. A Perspective co-authored by more than fifty researchers arguing that contemporary academic structures and incentives suppress scientific creativity and disproportionately hold back early-career researchers.
• Ben Reinhardt — The Hardcore Institute of Technology. Spectech. September 3, 2026. Prompted by the executive order for a US Space Academy, Reinhardt pitches a new kind of technical institution: an industrial research lab rather than a university, forging elite scientists and engineers by taking on journeymen and apprentices who learn by doing serious pre-commercial work, tuition-free and salaried, with no grades or degrees.
• Amit Gupta — From Bits to Atoms: Building the Infrastructure for the New Scientific Era. Catalyze. September 2, 2026. Argues the binding constraint on AI-driven discovery is physical execution, and calls for a networked R&D infrastructure to commission, fund and verify experiments across labs, capturing the “dark data” of negative results and tacit judgement that published literature omits.
• NACo — Congress Passes Short-Term Funding Bill Keeping the Federal Government Funded Through December 11. September 2, 2026. The stopgap bill, passed 370-48 in the House and signed into law by President Trump, bars OMB from finalising its rule letting political appointees override grant peer review before December 11, confirming in statute a delay the Senate had only voted on.
• Federico Bignone, Ammon Salter & Stefano Baruffaldi — Examining the Innovation Funding Lifecycle: Selection, Reapplication and Firm Outcomes in Innovate UK Funding. Innovation & Research Caucus. September 2, 2026. Using Innovate UK records from 2017 to 2024 and a regression-discontinuity design, finds entry into the funding system is highly selective, rejection rarely drives firms away, and every £1 of grant is associated with about £1.68 in additional private venture funding, making the grant chiefly a lever to mobilise private capital.
• Paul Karon — Catalyze: A New Funding Model to Connect Donors and Scientific Research. Inside Philanthropy. September 1, 2026. Profiles Catalyze, Sandeep Patel's new platform (with Amit Gupta and David Bowen) that leverages the peer review NIH and NSF already do, surfacing highly-rated but unfunded proposals so philanthropists can find and back vetted science via AI-assisted search. The built version of the "science-vetting machine" idea, launched with 80 to 100 projects.
• Nelson Ndahiro & Reinvent Science — Field Report: How I Let AI Do Some of My Thinking as an Experimental Scientist. Reinvent Science. September 1, 2026. A wet-lab scientist describes representing his lab as code so coding agents can design plates, cost assays and catch pipetting errors, offloading the operational drudgery that drives talent from the bench.
• Andrew Gerard — Pierre Azoulay on Open Science as an Economic Institution. Macroscience. August 28, 2026. A writeup of an IFP Economics of Ideas lecture on science as an economic institution: Merton’s CUDOS norms and the Matthew effect, why firms let scientists publish (Stern’s compensating differential), Pasteur’s Quadrant, and evidence that funding people rather than projects buys more risk-taking.
• Zachary Pirtle, Mahmud Farooque & Michael Bernstein — Metascience for Public Missions: Principles for Agency Implementation. Engineering Outcomes. August 28, 2026. As agencies face an October 19 deadline to propose metascience units under the Golden Age report, the authors urge them to draw on the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) tradition, mixed methods and public-value mapping, so the units become a learning capability rather than a compliance exercise.
• Gemma Derrick, Amy Devenney & Lizzie Ville — Universities Rarely Use Research Evidence in Their Decision-Making, So Why Do They Expect Anyone Else To?. LSE Impact. August 27, 2026. From the Wellcome-funded COMET project (55 decision-makers at six UK universities): universities produce the evidence other institutions rely on but rarely draw on externally validated research-on-research evidence for their own research-culture and strategy decisions, leaning instead on internal data and competitor benchmarking.
• Columbia Postdoctoral Workers (UAW Local 4100) — Columbia postdocs authorise a strike after contract talks stall. August 27, 2026. With the contract that set a $70,000 minimum postdoc salary expired on June 30 and six months of talks without a deal, over 90% of roughly 850 voters (the union’s largest turnout) authorised a strike over demands including an $80,000 minimum.
• Kaare Nielsen — Vi ønsker gennembrud, men organiserer forskningen som vi plejer. Science Report. August 26, 2026. The POMUS founder argues research organisation is itself a policy variable and calls for a permanent Danish experiment-pool to test new institutional models (long grants, FROs, DARPA-style program managers).
• Mark Rubin — Mindless Transparency. Critical Metascience. August 24, 2026. An argument against maximal openness as a default, since transparency is always a selection and the aim should be disclosure of the relevant, not of everything.
• Kevin Munger — Introducing the K-index. Never Met a Science. August 24, 2026. A send-up of academic metrics arguing that the proliferation of boutique, for-profit indices de-naturalises measurement itself, since once many are possible no single one can pass as neutral truth.
• Dan Garisto — Exclusive: NSF Set to Issue Lowest Number of New Grants in Four Decades. Nature. August 20, 2026. NSF will award about 30% fewer new grants this fiscal year, roughly 6,100 and the lowest since the early 1980s, mainly because about $1 billion of its $8.8-billion budget is held in a central account.
• Peter Gluckman — Modern Science: Geostrategic, Technological and Societal Drivers of Change. International Science Council. August 19, 2026. The ISC president argues science must not respond passively to the forces reshaping it, and calls for rethinking its self-governance, incentives and social contract.
• Science Works — Reforming UKRI Eligibility. Science Works. August 19, 2026. An open letter to UKRI arguing that eligibility rules, not merit, keep new research organisations out of public funding, and proposing reforms so a track record with trusted funders can substitute for the three-years-of-accounts rule.
• Frederik Hertel — Brud med forlagenes magt kræver et opgør med meriteringssystemet. Forskerforum (DM). August 17, 2026. Argues that fighting publishers over price and copyright is not enough, because their power rests on the academic merit system that makes journal rankings the currency of a career.
• NSF — NSF Announces $1.5B for Foundational Research to Drive Scientific Breakthroughs. NSF. August 17, 2026. NSF released 12 new funding opportunities and a shift to a portfolio-based approach, framing many calls as structured experiments it will assess and scale, in effect running metascience on itself.
• James Evans — Why AI Systems Are Most Useful as Designers of New Scientific Tools. Nature. August 17, 2026. A review of Alexander Krauss’s The Engine of Scientific Discovery, drawing the implication that an AI’s most important contribution to science may be helping design the next generation of scientific instruments.
• Denisa Lepadatu & Ed Boyden — The Ground Truth Institute. Universe Conquering. August 17, 2026. A proposal for a Ground Truth Institute to “engineer” scientific revolutions in biology by unifying tool-building, data-gathering and commercial deployment so downstream returns fund the high-risk pioneers upstream.
• Paul Litvak — How Well Does AI Peer Review Work?. In One Lifetime. August 10, 2026. Litvak planted 100 known errors into 10 psychology papers and ran them through AI review tools: the best single system caught 71, but pooling every system caught 93.
• Sandeep Patel, Stuart Buck, Ian Banks & Amit Gupta — America Already Built the World’s Largest Science-Vetting Machine. Macroscience. August 11, 2026. Argues the peer review of the many top-quartile proposals NIH and NSF leave unfunded should be treated as public infrastructure, via an opt-in platform letting scientists share those reviews with private funders.
• Jenn Gustetic (IFP) — Ambitious American Science Requires Reliable and Effective Federal Funding. Institute for Progress. August 11, 2026. IFP and the Niskanen Center file a joint comment opposing OMB’s grant rule, arguing universal discretionary termination and political pre-issuance review would destabilise federal funding and demote the expert peer review empirically tied to better outcomes.
• Max Bennett — When the Best Decision Is No Decision: The Rise of Randomization in Grant Funding. Nature. August 2026. A survey of the growing use of partial lotteries in research funding, spanning the Swiss National Science Foundation, the British Academy, and eleven trials catalogued by the Research on Research Institute since 2022.
• Søren Riis Paludan, Eske Willerslev, Susanne Mandrup m.fl. — Danmark skal investere i grundforskning, der skaber fremtidens gennembrud. Altinget. August 13, 2026. Sixteen leaders of Danmarks Grundforskningsfond Centers of Excellence call on the government to recapitalise the foundation, defending concentrated, long-horizon basic research as the source of breakthroughs.
• Retraction Watch — Biology Journal Pulls 100+ Articles and Counting From Special Issues for Peer-Review Manipulation. August 12, 2026. The International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has retracted more than 120 papers since June 2026, almost all from guest-edited special issues, citing "systemic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process."
• Retraction Watch — BMJ Public Health Retracts COVID-19 Vaccine Excess-Mortality Study Cited at Senate Hearing. August 11, 2026. A 2024 excess-mortality paper invoked to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths, including at a June 2026 US Senate hearing, was retracted "on the grounds of misinformation on causes of death and limited original work."
• GeekWire — Gates Foundation Gives $540 Million to UW Health Institute, the Largest Gift in University History. August 10, 2026. A ten-year commitment to UW's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, expanding the Global Burden of Disease study's coverage from 925 to nearly 5,000 locations worldwide.
• STAT News — NIH Plans to Block International Researchers on Visas From Accessing Key Funding Avenue. August 7, 2026. NIH intends to restrict its K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award, the main bridge from postdoc to independent PI, to US citizens and permanent residents, closing a key route for international researchers on visas.
• Science/AAAS — China Now Tops the U.S. in R&D Spending by One Key Measure. August 7-8, 2026. Japan's NISTEP indicators find China's 2024 R&D spending reached about $615bn, overtaking the US for the first time and making China the leader on all three core measures.
• Unite the Union — Staff at World-Leading Institute of Cancer Research to Strike Over Pay. Updated August 7, 2026. ICR's indefinite strike, the charity's first industrial action in its 117-year history, running since 3 June 2026, escalated into Acas-mediated talks.
• Adam Glen — The State Is the Customer. Adam’s Substack. August 6, 2026. Argues the UK’s translational intermediaries, the Catapult network and ARIA’s Activation Partners, have become the customer of first resort for the technologies they fund, crowding out real market formation, and calls for funding founders directly through procurement vouchers and fellowships rather than institutions.
• TechCrunch / Axios — Jeff Dean and Other Top AI Researchers Are Leaving Google to Launch Their Own Startup. August 5, 2026. Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean left after 27 years, with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, to found Discovery Loop, aiming to automate the experimental loop of scientific research.
• Times Higher Education — National Security Used to Curb Academic Freedom, Report Says. August 5, 2026. A BRISMES Committee on Academic Freedom report documents 28 cases where governments and universities invoked counter-terrorism, national-security, or community-safety justifications to restrict academic expression.
• NSF — New NSF State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs Will Power AI. August 4, 2026. A $100 million programme funding up to ten regional consortia to build shared AI and scientific-compute infrastructure for researchers outside frontier institutions.
• Science/AAAS — NIH Director Bhattacharya Kills More Health-Disparities Grants. August 4, 2026. NIH terminated a $9.6 million University of Pittsburgh grant studying cognitive aging and Alzheimer's risk among Black residents of low-income neighbourhoods, citing its health-disparities framing.
• EIS — GCU Strike, Day Four. August 4, 2026. UCU and EIS members at Glasgow Caledonian University took a fourth strike day against proposed cuts of up to 100 posts, with management still not ruling out compulsory redundancies.
• US Department of Education — Secretary McMahon Issues National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards. August 3, 2026. An open letter asking every US institution to publicly answer seven questions on admissions, viewpoint diversity, research security, and national priorities by year-end 2026.
• NSF — Prohibition on Collaborations with Restricted Entities. Dear Colleague Letter 26-022. July 8, 2026 (effective FY2027). Bars NSF-funded senior and key personnel from appointments with, support from, or collaboration with any entity on seven federal restricted-party lists.
• South China Morning Post — Pentagon Expands Blacklist to Include China's Top Civilian Universities. July 23, 2026. DoD's Section 1286 list expands to 130 institutions, the largest single-cycle expansion in its history, barring elite civilian universities like Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong for the first time.
• Mark Hahnel — Do we actually need to write research papers at all?. OpenResearch.wtf. July 31, 2026. Argues that as AI strips the friction out of analysis and write-up, the research paper stops being the point, leaving certification, trust and provenance as the scarce product.
• Hiya Jain, Stuart Buck, Aishwarya Khanduja & Analogue — A Taxonomy of R&D Orgs: What Is New, What Is Missing?. Analogue Press / Good Science Project. July 31, 2026. Maps the design space of research organisations along nine parameters so funders and researchers can find unfilled "holes" in the ecosystem the way Marblestone and Rodriques named the FRO-shaped one.
• Jacob Robertson & Cate Young — What Does it Take to Deliver a New Golden Age?. FAS. July 30, 2026. A Federation of American Scientists response to the OSTP Science: A New Golden Age report, arguing the vision is serious but that the next era hinges on implementation into agency structure, funding models, and hiring.
• Stuart Buck (Good Science Project) — Moonshots, the Impact of Science Cuts, the Genesis Mission, and more. The Good Science Project. July 25, 2026. A metascience reading roundup surfacing the pieces below and announcing the Metascience 2027 Conference (Montreal, June 14-16, 2027).
• Daniel P. Gross, Bhaven N. Sampat & Hansen Zhang — Retreating from Science: The Long-Run Effects of the 1970s U.S. Military Disinvestment from University Research. NBER Working Paper 35491. July 2026. Studies the DoD's roughly 70% real-dollar cut to university research contracts after 1970, finding lasting declines in publications, PhD training, and downstream innovation in more DoD-exposed fields.
• Leya Mohsin — The Science of Moonshots: Using Evidence to Design Transformative Initiatives. FAS. July 2026. Argues "moonshot" has become a tired marketing term, and recovers what the genuine article requires: a clear end goal and path to it, and governance concentrating authority with accountability to a defined endpoint.
• Dan Turner-Evans — Picking the Right Challenges for Genesis Mission. Institute for Progress. July 2026. Argues the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission spreads across far too many challenges (26) to function as a real moonshot, and should narrow to a small set of goals where the federal government adds unique value.
• M. Anthony Mills — Who Should Decide How to Use Taxpayer Dollars to Fund Scientific Research?. Issues in Science and Technology. July 2026. Responds to the White House's moves to fire the National Science Board and let political appointees cancel grants, arguing the federal research enterprise should remain democratically accountable.
• Noah Smith — We asked too much of the American university. Noahpinion. July 24, 2026. Argues the American university became the country's last broadly functional institution, overloaded by mass enrolment and the social-unification roles that churches, the military, and mass media shed after 1970.
• Carlos Arleo — Can AI tell if your research is actually new?. Go Meta! (RoRI). July 24, 2026. Describes building the Disruption & Novelty Indicator (DNI), an AI novelty detector that earned a special mention in the UK Metascience Unit's 2025-26 Novelty Indicators Challenge.
• Mark Rubin — Feminist Metascience and Feminist Open Science. Critical Metascience. July 24, 2026. Introduces a forthcoming Gender & Society special issue defining feminist metascience as the study of how gender and power relations shape how knowledge is produced, evaluated, and corrected.
• The White House — White House Commits More Than $5 Billion to Expand the Genesis Mission. July 22, 2026. Fifteen-plus federal agencies commit funding, datasets, and facilities, and DOE selects 278 AI-for-science projects across 50 states.
• Hewlett Foundation — Hewlett Foundation Announces New $100 Million Emerging Technology and Security Initiative. July 22, 2026. A five-year, $20M/year initiative targeting governance gaps between fast-moving AI, biotech, and quantum research and slower regulatory frameworks.
• Inside Higher Ed — Portland State Will Lay Off 36 Employees, Close 2 Departments. July 21, 2026. A final reduction plan cuts 34 full-time faculty and closes two departments, driven by a $35 million two-year budget shortfall.
• Roll Call — Critics Mount Offensive Against Change to Federal Grant Rules. July 20, 2026. OMB's Uniform Guidance overhaul closed its comment period on July 13 with 496,769 submissions, about 95% opposed; OMB is reportedly now targeting finalisation by October 1, 2026.
• Bloomberg / Higher Ed Dive — States Win Suit Over Trump Administration Termination of Grants. July 17, 2026. US District Judge Indira Talwani granted summary judgment to a coalition of 23 states, ruling that standard federal grant terms do not permit agencies to terminate awards based on program priorities identified after the grant was made.
• Research on Research Institute — The Future of Peer Review. July 2026. Capstone report of RoRI's three-year peer review project (39 stakeholder interviews plus literature review) concludes current peer review is unsustainable under hyper-competition supercharged by AI, and argues for systemic reform over per-project patches.
• Baumann et al. — Stop Automating Peer Review Without Rigorous Evaluation. Presented at ICML 2026, July 8, 2026. Finds AI-generated peer reviews show a "hivemind effect" (higher cross-paper similarity than human-involved reviews) and are gameable via "paper laundering," an LLM rewrite with no substantive change measurably raising AI-reviewer scores.
• Kristin Ellis — Science Is So Back. Contents May Shift. July 27, 2026. A reading of the OSTP Science: A New Golden Age report, calling it the most serious rethink of US research since Bush's 1945 report even as it arrives after deep cuts.
• Andrew Gerard, Jenn Gustetic & Matthew Esche — Science Agencies Need Metascience Units. Institute for Progress (also cross-posted to Macroscience). July 23, 2026. Argues federal science agencies should stand up empowered metascience units: internal think-tank teams that run controlled experiments and mine administrative data to learn how to fund and conduct science better.
• Michael Kratsios (OSTP) — Science: A New Golden Age. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. July 22, 2026. A 123-page report billed as the first comprehensive rethink of the US science enterprise since Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier, recommending support for individual scientists, diversified funding, agile research organisations, and agency metascience units.
• NSF & Astera Institute — Astera partnering with the National Science Foundation. Astera Institute / NSF. July 2026. NSF is investing $400M over four years to build a national network of 20 AI-enabled autonomous Programmable Cloud Lab nodes, in partnership with Astera, as part of the Genesis Mission.
• Reinvent Science — The Scientific Literature is Poisonous to LLMs. Reinvent Science. July 21, 2026. Argues the modern scientific literature is uniquely toxic training data, since scientists judge reliability through informal social networks that AI agents cannot access.
• Tom Kalil — Kalil's Corner: The Role of Philanthropy in Identifying and Pursuing AI Moonshots. SCI PHI (Renaissance Philanthropy). July 21, 2026. Argues philanthropy should fund the AI moonshots the market under-invests in: public goods like open datasets and benchmarks, fundamental science, and applications serving low-income populations.
• Department of Homeland Security — Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students and Exchange Visitors. Federal Register. July 17, 2026. Final rule ending the indefinite "duration of status" for F-1 and J-1 visa holders, replacing it with a fixed admission period of up to four years, effective September 15, 2026.
• Bloomberg — Warren Buffett Ended Gifts to Gates Foundation Amid Jeffrey Epstein Scrutiny. July 14-15, 2026. Buffett excluded the Gates Foundation from his 2026 mid-year gift for the first time since 2006, redirecting roughly $6 billion in Berkshire Hathaway shares to family foundations.
• World Weather Attribution — Fossil fuel emissions have rapidly worsened European heatwaves in just a few decades. July 13, 2026. A rapid attribution study finding the June 2026 heatwave's temperatures would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change.
• Christian Hendriksen (via Altinget) — Forsker: Københavns Universitet undergraver den ambitiøse danske forskningsstrategi. Altinget. July 2026. The University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Science and Health is cutting roughly 100 professor-equivalent posts even as the university received DKK 148.8 million in extra 2026 research-strategy funding.
• CNBC / TechCrunch — John Jumper to leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic and Google Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves for OpenAI. June 18-19, 2026. Within a day of each other, AlphaFold co-creator John Jumper left DeepMind for Anthropic and Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer left Google for OpenAI.
• Australian Research Council — ARC Open Access Policy – 2026 Update. Effective July 1, 2026. Requires journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers from newly opened grant schemes to be openly accessible immediately upon publication under a CC BY licence, with no embargo allowance.
• Astera Institute — 2026 Hidden Science Competition. Astera Institute. July 2026. A follow-on competition targeting the useful science that gets done but never shared, offering life-sciences graduate researchers $10,000 contracts to publish null results, dead-end datasets, and code openly.
• Fahd Husain, Antonia Theodorakopoulou, James Custer & Tom Kalil — Charting AI's Role in Scientific Discovery. Renaissance Philanthropy. July 15, 2026. A landscape study of where AI is becoming a structural enabler of scientific discovery, arguing progress is broad but shallow and the binding constraint is shifting from model capability to data infrastructure.
• Conor Griffin & Don Wallace — Conjecture Machines: AI Agents and the New Validation Bottleneck in Science. Google DeepMind. July 15, 2026. Argues AI agents are becoming "conjecture machines" that make hypotheses abundant and cheap while validation stays physical, institutional, and slow, so refutation becomes the binding constraint.
• Andy Stirling — Illuminating Neglected Uncertainties: How Metascience Can Help Rather Than Hinder Democracy. Go Meta! (RoRI). July 15, 2026. A critical-metascience essay arguing the field's hardest problems come less from too little evidence than from asking too little about what evidence cannot settle.
• Alex Shintaro Araki — The Race to Allocate One Trillion Dollars in Philanthropic Capital. Alex's Substack. July 14, 2026. Argues imminent frontier-AI-lab IPOs will mint thousands of new millionaires holding over $1 trillion, and that philanthropy is unprepared, with absorptive capacity and talent the binding constraint.
• Daniel Correa — Scaling Team Science Is the Important Experiment We Need. FAS. July 14, 2026. The FAS CEO makes the case for the NSF's X-Labs (up to $1.5 billion) as a valuable experiment that scales the philanthropically de-risked Focused Research Organization model of team-based, goal-oriented science.
• Avery Orrall — 'The exploitation still remains': Stats journal associate editors resign over $3,000 publishing charge. Retraction Watch. July 9, 2026. Eighteen of 160 associate editors at Springer Nature's Statistics and Computing resigned after the journal announced a mandatory $2,990 article-processing charge, calling it "irreconcilable with our vision of science."
• Nature — Nobel-winning chemist leaves US to direct AI materials lab in China. Nature. July 9, 2026. Chemistry Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi left UC Berkeley to lead a new AI-assisted materials-discovery institute at Tsinghua University, citing US grant cuts, joining a documented pattern of senior scientists (including Charles Lieber) moving toward China.
• United States Senate Committee on Appropriations — Sen. Collins Asks OMB to Withdraw Parts of Grant Rule, Extend Comment Period. July 7, 2026. Appropriations Chair Susan Collins asks OMB to withdraw the provisions of its proposed grant-review rule affecting scientific and biomedical research and to extend the comment period 90 days.
• Novo Nordisk Foundation — No easy answers: European research consortia take on major challenges. July 10, 2026. Nine 2026 Challenge Programme grants worth up to €80M over six years, the first cycle since the scheme opened to European main applicants, with seven of nine consortia led outside Denmark.
• Noah Smith — MAGA's Attack on Science Is Even Worse Than It Looks. Noahpinion. July 10, 2026. Argues the postwar US scientific enterprise was an engine of American preeminence now under an unprecedented Trump-administration attack of funding cuts and ideological review.
• Aishwarya Khanduja & Stuart Buck — Seeing Like a Gardener: A New Framework for the Public Funding of Science. Analogue Press (originally for Liberal Currents, The Reconstruction Papers). July 10, 2026. Applies James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State to US science policy, arguing the state should act less like a central planner and more like a gardener cultivating a diverse ecosystem of organisational forms.
• Mohana Basu — Think preprints are unreliable? Analysis of 70,000 studies might change your mind. Nature. July 10, 2026. A bioRxiv study comparing 72,644 biomedical preprints with their published versions found about 90% of main conclusions unchanged or only minorly revised after peer review.
• Analogue, Aishwarya Khanduja & Stuart Buck — Studying Inquiry: Ideas for Metascience Experiments. Analogue Press. July 6, 2026. A catalogue of 32 concrete, testable experiments for how science is funded and organised, in the spirit of Azoulay's call to "turn the scientific method on ourselves."
• Retraction Watch — Computer science society creates new research integrity role to address case backlog. Retraction Watch. July 2, 2026. ACM is hiring its first director of research integrity after a five-year rise in misconduct allegations left a backlog of cases taking a year or more to resolve.
• Science — NIH likely to award fewer grants as it races to spend its 2026 budget. Science/AAAS. June 29, 2026. As of June 20, NIH had made 27,541 awards worth $16bn against a $47.2bn FY2026 budget that must be spent by September 30, with the grant success rate falling from 21% to 11%.
• PBS NewsHour / American Enterprise Institute — College endowment tax is leading to hiring freezes and could mean cuts in financial aid. PBS NewsHour. Effective July 1, 2026. A new tiered US endowment excise tax took effect, estimated to cost Harvard about $368M/year and Yale, Princeton, and Stanford comparable sums.
• Council of the European Union — Council agrees negotiating position on FP10. June 26, 2026. The Council adopted its partial negotiating mandate for Horizon Europe's successor programme (2028–2034) at €167.9 billion, below the Commission's €175 billion proposal, ahead of negotiations with Parliament.
• Caroline Fry & Andrew Gerard — Science for Development: What Comes Next?. Lauren Policy. June 24, 2026. Reflections from a Washington workshop arguing the returns to LMIC R&D are high but the evidence on what works is fragmented, under-visible, and weakly connected to decision-making.
• The White House — Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation and Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks. June 22, 2026. Two executive orders: one launches a federal effort (QC-ADDS) to deliver at least one application-scale quantum computer to a DOE facility for open scientific use; the other mandates federal migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2030–31.
• Pierre Azoulay, Raffaella Sadun & Daniela Scur — Before the Exodus? Young Scientists and the Future of US Science. NBER Working Paper 35330. June 2026. A survey of 916 young biomedical scientists finds only about half now say they are likely to remain in academia, down 22 points in six months, evidence of a possible exodus of future PIs.
• Pierre Azoulay — In (Qualified) Defense of the Research Project Grant. Science. June 11, 2026. A skeptical response to the reform push to move from investigator-initiated project grants toward independent, block-funded institutes, defending what the research project grant gets right structurally. "Wary, not opposed."
• Søren Barlebo Rasmussen & Bo Jellesmark Thorsen — Universitetet i bevægelse: samfundskobling, strategisk prioritering og nye spændinger i forskningen. Mobilize Strategy Consulting. June 5, 2026. A Danish essay arguing the classical research model is not in crisis but in motion, pushed toward stronger societal coupling by systemic challenges and more strategic, portfolio-based funding.
• National Bureau of Statistics of China, via Nature — China's 2025 R&D spending and 15th Five-Year Plan targets. Nature. June 2, 2026. China's 2025 R&D spend reached $549.7bn (2.80% of GDP, above the OECD average for the first time); basic-research funding crossed 7% of total R&D spend for the first time; the 2026–2030 plan targets at least 7% average annual R&D growth.
• Inside Higher Ed / NPR — OMB proposes rules establishing political review of federal research grants. May 29, 2026 (comment period closes July 13, 2026). Proposed rule would require political-appointee pre-issuance review of discretionary grants across NIH, NSF, CDC, and DOE; downgrade peer review to advisory status; extend foreign-collaboration bans government-wide; and permit "convenience terminations" of active awards.
• Anders M. Klöcker & Søren Barlebo Rasmussen — Mellem hype og styrkepositioner: Prioritering i forsknings- og innovationspolitikken. Mobilize Strategy Consulting. May 14, 2026. A Danish essay on prioritisation in research and innovation policy, contrasting hype cycles with mature "strongholds" and arguing that mission-oriented innovation stays rhetoric unless authority and resources are genuinely concentrated.
• Jens Peter Andersen & Jesper W. Schneider — Forskningslandskabet i Danmark: En analyse af konkurrenceudsatte forskningsmidler. Dansk Center for Forskningsanalyse (Aarhus Universitet). May 2026. A systematic empirical mapping of Danish competitive research funding, 2018–2024, finding the system's instrument diversity is thinner than assumed, with the project grant dominating and imposing structural bindings.
• Bjerre et al. — Safe to Speak, Teach, and Research? Experiences of Reprisals in Danish Academia. British Journal of Sociology. February 21, 2026. Peer-reviewed analysis of 130 #SafeToSpeak testimonies finds 49.4% of surveyed Danish university researchers report fearing, being threatened with, or experiencing reprisals for speaking up.
• Nature Index — Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders. Nature. June 2026. China's indexed research output rose 22.4% year-on-year and nine of the global top ten institutions are now Chinese; India entered the global top ten for the first time. First year the index incorporated applied-sciences journals.
• Mark Rubin — What is critical metascience and why is it important? Frontiers in Psychology. July 2, 2026. Argues for "critical metascience" as a distinct field that steps back to question metascience's own assumptions, contending the field is dominated by an activist open-science reform movement prone to collective bias.
• Nature — The complex truth about trust in science. Nature. July 1, 2026. Editorial arguing that public confidence in science has not collapsed but that scientists face urgent problems to address, paired with a companion piece urging researchers to recognise their own political biases to build public trust.
• Seemay Chou (Astera Institute) — What Scientists Said: Results from Astera's First Essay Competition. Astera Institute. July 1, 2026. Nearly 200 working scientists published essays diagnosing structural bottlenecks in their fields, with coordination failure the dominant theme.
• Ben Reinhardt & Dan Recht — Pivot Your Career at Age 50. Reinvent Science. June 30, 2026. Argues that as scientists' healthspans lengthen, Planck's principle threatens to slow progress, so scientists should make a dramatic pivot to a new field between ages 50 and 60.
• Kirsty Grainger — A Stupid Idea: Why the UK university crisis needs something politically impossible. anotherwayoflookingatit. June 29, 2026. Argues the UK university crisis should be met with a coordinated, nationally strategic managed contraction rather than market-driven decline, assigning each university disciplinary strength areas backed by block grants.
• David Hilmer Rex — Debatten om metascience giver et alt for snævert billede. Der er behov for at brede samtalen ud. Science Report. June 27, 2026. Argues the Danish metascience debate has become too narrow, and calls for a more diverse ecosystem of institutions and new social practices for science.
• ARIA — Clouds, clouds, everywhere. ARIA. June 26, 2026. ARIA's June update on new seed funding calls, plus a feature on Earth Compress, a £7M project building open-source AI infrastructure to compress and share petabyte-scale environmental data.
• Kris Willis — Making Our Own Luck. The Good Science Project (cross-posted from Macroscience). June 25, 2026. Presents a bibliometric method that detects a signal of transformative breakthroughs on average five years before they occur by tracking bursts of new, influential, cross-topic papers.
• Caroline Fry and Andrew Gerard — Science for Development: what comes next? Lauren Policy. June 24, 2026. DC workshop report on science in LMICs: returns are high but evidence is fragmented, there is no dedicated LMIC science think tank, and the effective customer is shifting away from USAID.
• DFIR — Nye rammer for ph.d.-uddannelsen til styrkelse af kreativitet, entreprenørskab og mobilitet. DFIR. June 26, 2026. Concludes the Danish PhD framework has been essentially unchanged since 1992 and calls for more flexibility in regulation, research time, and thesis formats.
• Alessandra Zimmermann (AAAS) — FY 2027 R&D Appropriations: The House R&D Report. AAAS. June 23, 2026. Summarises the House's first round of FY2027 markups, which sharply softened the administration's proposed cuts, holding NIH roughly flat while NSF faces a 20% cut, down from the 54.7% requested.
• Elizabeth Gibney — Europe as science superpower: what it will take to rival the US and China. Nature. June 23, 2026. Europe already rivals the US on academic output but faces a persistent gap converting research into economic value.
• Ludo Waltman, André Brasil, Kathleen Gregory, Stephen Pinfield & Peter Kolarz (RoRI) — From hyper-competition to strategic leadership: The role of funders and research institutions in 21st-century science. Research on Research Institute. June 23, 2026. Argues peer-review problems cannot be resolved within the current hyper-competitive logic, proposing funders shift to block funding based on institutional strategic profiles.
• Brendan Haley — Why does Canada develop megaprojects instead of innovation systems? Centre for Industrial Policy. June 23, 2026. Argues Canada is structurally caught in the “staple trap”: crises push governments toward resource megaprojects rather than innovation systems, in contrast to MITI, Fraunhofer, and DARPA.
• Christian Hendriksen — Om få år er problemet ikke, at forskere bruger AI for meget. Det er, at de bruger det for lidt. Altinget. June 22, 2026. CBS associate professor argues AI non-use will soon be the larger problem; calls on universities to provide institutional access to frontier models or risk making good scientific practice a privilege of the well-funded.
• Geoff Mulgan — Shaping future institutions: What insights do academic disciplines offer? Substack. June 22, 2026. Surveys what economics, psychology, law, anthropology, and management theory each contribute to institutional design, finding strong analysis but no field that takes institutional design as its primary object.
• Policy Atlas & Aidan K. — Five lessons from building evidence-strength scoring into an AI policy tool. Substack. June 22, 2026. Five practical lessons about reliability, transparency, and domain specificity from using LLMs to classify study types for a Nesta-backed policy evidence tool.
• Science — NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say. Science. June 2026. NSF has cut basic research budgets by 20–30%+ to fund the new $1.5B X-Labs initiative, despite a 3% congressional reduction cap.
• Isaac Barbosa — Distributed peer review ‘good but no holy grail’, DSIT official says. Research Professional News. June 19, 2026. UKRI pilot results: 65% reduction in per-application assessment time; DSIT Metascience Unit cautions that speed gains don’t resolve selection-quality questions; follow-on AI survey announced.
• Crypto Briefing — BioProtocol launches OpenLabs at DeSci Berlin. June 19, 2026. OpenLabs combines AI agents with community voting to coordinate research funding on BIO Protocol infrastructure; BIO Genesis raised $33 million ahead of the launch.
• Nicolas Dufourcq, Rafael Laguna de la Vera et al. — Report of the Franco-German Task Force on Breakthrough Innovation. French Ministry of Economy / German Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. June 18, 2026. Recommends France establish a dedicated ARPA-type entity interoperable with SPRIND; identifies five ARPA invariants and a taxonomy of failure modes; argues France’s gap is institutional, not financial.
• Uddannelses- og Forskningsstyrelsen — Bekendtgørelse nr. 548 om stillingsstruktur for videnskabeligt personale ved universiteter. Uddannelses- og Forskningsstyrelsen. June 18, 2026. Revises the Danish position structure for academic staff, opening the honorarium-paid clinical lecturer and clinical professor positions to professional groups beyond physicians.
• Lars Frølund — From Fenced Yards to Shared Gardens: Quantum Technology, Sovereignty, and the Middle-Power Moment. Inaugural Lecture, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. June 19, 2026. Argues middle powers need “shared gardens” of collective capabilities held by trusted coalitions, proposing a Nordic Quantum Buyers’ Club as an embedded demand mechanism.
• Stanford HAI — 2026 AI Index Report. Stanford University. 2026. Leading AI models score above human-expert baseline on PhD-level science question benchmarks for the first time, and a new science chapter documents AI's expanding role across the disciplines.
• Alexander C. Furnas, Ruixue Jia, Margaret E. Roberts & Dashun Wang — Geopolitics in the Evaluation of International Scientific Collaboration. NBER Working Paper 34789. 2026. Two RCTs showing US policymakers and scientists penalise China-collaboration proposals by 18–40 pp vs. identical Germany proposals — the first empirical demonstration of geopolitical bias in science evaluation.
• Nils Gilman — The University As We Know It Is Finished. Persuasion. June 2026. Argues Clark Kerr's "multiversity" is coming apart, with AI rendering obsolete the shared knowledge-transmission technologies that held it together, to be replaced by disaggregation.
• Søren Barlebo Rasmussen & Bo Jellesmark Thorsen — Universitetet i bevægelse: samfundskobling, strategisk prioritering og nye spændinger i forskningen. Mobilize Nordic. 2026. Argues the classical disciplinary model is not in crisis but in motion, creating real dilemmas between autonomy, strategic direction, and institutional identity.
• Caleb Watney & Jenn Gustetic — The Six Camps of Metascience: A Field Guide for Policymakers. Macroscience. June 11, 2026.
• Geoff Mulgan — Rethinking universities' social contracts (…and how to avoid the fate of the monasteries). Substack. June 11, 2026.
• Science Works & Wellcome Trust — Reorganising Research. Call for evidence mapping UK institutions operating outside the mainstream academic model; essay prize (£3,000, deadline July 15, 2026). June 2026.
• Paul A. David (posthumous), ed. Bronwyn H. Hall & Jacques Mairesse — Research universities' futures in the networked world: technological challenges and opportunities for institutional responses. Economics of Innovation and New Technology. June 10, 2026.
• Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential. June 2026.
• Gerard DiPippo, Jonathon Sine & Benjamin Lenain — China's Techno-Industrial Strategy in the Xi Era: Producing Under Pressure. RAND Corporation. 2026.
• Anthropic — Making Claude a Chemist. June 5, 2026.
• Lucas Laursen — NSF Experiments With New Kind of Science Funding. IEEE Spectrum. June 4, 2026.
• David Matthews — European DARPAs Won't Create New Industries Overnight. Science|Business. June 4, 2026.
• Mark Hahnel — The New Era of Going "Fast and Far" in Research. June 4, 2026.
• Shaun Leamon, Helen Buckley Woods, Peter Kolarz, James Wilsdon & Stephen Curry — Fast and Flexible Research Funding: A Review. RoRI Working Paper No. 20. May 2026.
• Erik Canton — Multi-Criteria Portfolio Construction for Research and Innovation Policy: A Heuristic Optimisation Approach. European Commission R&I Paper Series. May 2026. Formalises R&I portfolio selection as a compromise optimisation problem and introduces a heuristic search for large candidate sets; shows ranking-based selection underperforms when criteria involve real trade-offs.
• Loren DeJonge Schulman & Leya Mohsin — What the Metascience Community Should Learn From the Federal Evidence Movement Before Making Our Mistakes. FAS. June 3, 2026.
• Matt Clancy, Caleb Watney et al. — A Policymaker-Centric Guide for Selecting Innovation Funding Mechanisms. NBER / University of Chicago Press. May 2026. Working-paper version: NBER w35549, July 2026.
• Adam Marblestone & Anastasia Gamick — Searching for X-Lab-Shaped Bottlenecks in Quantum Interconnect and Integrated Photonics. May 29, 2026.
• Cosmos Institute — What Will You Build For: Matt Clifford. May 29, 2026.
• ARIA — May Update: From the Lab to the World. May 29, 2026.
• IFP — IFP Update: May 2026. May 29, 2026.
• Dorothy Chou & Zoë Brammer — AI for Science Funding Strategy. May 2026.
• Stuart Buck — Mental Health at NIH. May 24, 2026.
• Snezana Gvozdenovic — The Burden of Discernment. Palladium. May 23, 2026.
• Jordi Cabana — Metascience Is Ignoring the National Labs. May 18, 2026.
• Eirini Malliaraki — How Big Is Our Blindspot? Why AI for Science Needs More Than Better Models. Renaissance Philanthropy (SCI PHI). May 14, 2026. Argues the binding constraint on AI-driven science is shifting from model capability to data infrastructure, since many fields lack both the right data and the incentives to produce it as a public good.
• Kevin Munger — Jubilee for Dysfunctional Institutions. May 12, 2026.
• Eric Gilliam — Turning Risk Appetite Into Impact: An Ode to Warren Weaver. May 22, 2026.
• Marius Oosthuizen — The Systems Transformation Architect: A Role for the Century Ahead. May 20, 2026.
• Alice Gibson — The Potential of Using Resources from Systems Change Theory to Strengthen Metascience. May 19, 2026.
• Nan Ransohoff — The Third Wave of American Philanthropy. May 19, 2026.
• Jiachen Liu et al. — The Last Human-Written Paper: Agent-Native Research Artifacts. arXiv:2604.24658. May 2026. Proposes replacing the PDF with a four-layer Agent-Native Research Artifact (ARA); reports QA accuracy improving from 72% to 94% and reproduction success from 57% to 64% on PaperBench.
• Anastasia Gamick and Adam Marblestone — NSF Just Did Something Important. May 18, 2026.
• Alex Shilina — Crypto's Most Serious AI Use Case May Be Science. April 25, 2026.
• Andy Hall — AI is already 10x-ing academic research. How do we get to 100x?. April 16, 2026.
• Sam Bogerd — It’s Time to Experiment with How Europe Funds Science. Science|Business. April 14, 2026. Argues that as the EU sets its next Framework Programme, almost no one asks how to learn to spend it well, and calls for an experimental metascience unit inside the European Commission.
• Forsker-bevægelsen — 130 Testimonies from the #SafeToSpeak Campaign. April 2026.
• Universities must reinvent themselves for the intelligent age. Time. April 13, 2026.
• Ben Reinhardt — Research Has Customers. April 9, 2026.
• Jordan Dworkin — Who will program manage the program managers?. March 25, 2026.
• Niko McCarty — Ideas for Biotechnology BBNs. March 13, 2026.
• Anastasia Gamick — Companies that should exist. March 10, 2026.
• Aimee Rose, Andrew Chang, and Raylene Yung — The Early Stage Deep Tech Funding Gap: Why Great Companies Get Stuck Between Capital Markets. March 5, 2026.
• Prachee Avasthi — Free the PhD. February 28, 2026.
• Jed McCaleb and Seemay Chou — Sharpening Astera's focus. February 23, 2026.
• Stuart Buck and Aishwarya Khanduja — A Reality-Based View of Government Funding of Science. February 18, 2026.
• Michael Nielsen — Which Future?. February 17, 2026.
• Renaissance Philanthropy — Rewiring the Knowledge Economy: Building a New Infrastructure for Research Funding.
• Nature — US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains. January 2026.
• Benchling — 2026 Biotech AI Report. Benchling. January 2026. A survey of AI adoption across biotech finding that real wins cluster where data is clean, structured, and verifiable, while adoption stalls in messier, regulated, generative-design territory.
• Eric Gilliam — The BBN Fund. January 16, 2026.
• Nan Ransohoff — There should be 'general managers' for more of the world's important problems. January 15, 2026.
• Anastasia Gamick, Adam Marblestone, and Joseph Fridman — Announcing Merge Labs. January 15, 2026.
• Andrew Gerard (IFP Metascience Team) — NSF Tech Labs FAQs. January 15, 2026.
• Sandeep Patel, Stuart Buck, and Amit Gupta — Accelerating the American Scientific Enterprise. January 14, 2026.
• Institute for Progress — IFP Update: New Science Funding Edition. January 13, 2026.
• Ben Reinhardt — Spectech Lessons and Updated Hypotheses from 2025. January 13, 2026.
• Santi Ruiz — What's Wrong with NIH Grants?. January 9, 2026.
• Samuel Arbesman and Asimov Press — Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?. January 8, 2026.
• Anastasia Bektimirova and Chris Fellingham — An ARIA-grade agenda for social science. January 8, 2026.
• David Lang — The Shape of Science to Come. January 3, 2026.
• Peter Palumbo, Jordan Kruger & Christopher L. Robinson — Decentralized Science Supported by Decentralized Finance to Support Pain Research: A Merger of Giants. 2026.
• Sharma, G., Munteanu, V., Ghiasi, N.M. et al. — Towards a Decentralized Future for Open-Science Databases. Nature Genetics. 2026.
• 2025
• Adam Marblestone — Convergent Research: A Mission Control for Frontier Technology. December 23, 2025.
• Stuart Buck & Aishwarya Khanduja — The Economy of Knowing. December 23, 2025.
• Adam Marblestone, Anastasia Gamick, and Joseph Fridman — What Is the Future Missing?. December 24, 2025.
• Ben Reinhardt — The Art of Industrial Leapfrogging. December 16, 2025.
• Convergent Research — The Future of Focused Research Organisations. December 16, 2025.
• Stuart Buck — Innovations in Scientific Institutions. December 13, 2025.
• Caleb Watney — Science Funding Goes Beyond the Universities. December 12, 2025.
• Federation of American Scientists — NSF Plans to Supercharge FRO-style Independent Labs. We Spoke with the Scientists Who First Proposed the Idea.. December 12, 2025.
• James Pethokoukis — Funding Outside the Box (A Quick Q&A). December 11, 2025.
• Prachee Avasthi — How to Not Make a Scientific Journal by Accident. December 4, 2025.
• Santi Ruiz (Statecraft) — How to Save Science Funding. December 4, 2025.
• Tim Hwang — Metascience in Dangerous Times. December 2, 2025.
• Pangram Labs — Pangram Predicts 21% of ICLR Reviews Are AI-Generated. November 2025.
• Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — A New National Purpose: Reimagining UK Science and Technology Through Lovelace Disruptive Invention Laboratories. November 20, 2025.
• Smrithi Sunil — Inside the movement that's rewriting how we do science. November 19, 2025.
• Ashlee Vance — Exclusive: A New Bid To Control The Genome. November 17, 2025.
• Seemay Chou — Big Experiments Are Only Big If They Can Fail. November 6, 2025.
• Sandeep Patel — Why Science Needs a Marketplace. How we can make scientific progress less accidental.. October 30, 2025.
• Anastasia Gamick — EP 05: Anastasia Gamick (Co-founder & President Convergent Research), Accelerate Science Now. October 30, 2025.
• Ben Reinhardt & Stuart Buck — The Paradox of Harmful Information. Risk and progress in the sciences.. October 15, 2025.
• Adam Marblestone — What Science can Learn from Startups | Adam Marblestone on Focused Research Organizations. October 7, 2025.
• Lukas Weidener & Sasha Shilina — Futarchy in decentralized science: empirical and simulation evidence for outcome-based conditional markets in DeSci DAOs. October 6, 2025.
• Karthik Tadepalli — Ideas Aren't Getting Harder to Find. October 2025.
• Prachee Avasthi — Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You. October 4, 2025.
• Pierre Azoulay, Matthew Clancy, Danielle Li & Bhaven N. Sampat — What If NIH Had Been 40% Smaller?. Science. September 25, 2025. A counterfactual analysis asking how today's medicines would have been affected if the permanent NIH budget had been 40% smaller, finding cuts of this magnitude could affect a large share of drug approvals.
• Nature — The Future of Universities. They made the modern world. Now they must survive it.. September 24, 2025.
• Ed Boyden, Nina Khera, Adam Marblestone & Claire Wang — The Tiling Tree Method: How to think of every way of solving a problem. September 21, 2025.
• Alvin Djajadikerta & Laura Lungu — Why science needs outsiders. September 18, 2025.
• Tom Kalil — EP 01: Tom Kalil (CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy), Accelerate Science Now. September 3, 2025.
• Geoff Mulgan — An ARIA for Social Issues?. September 2, 2025.
• Stuart Buck — The case for crazy philanthropy. August 22, 2025.
• Ben Reinhardt & Dan Recht — Science Needs Outlier Organizations. There is no best structure, but there are many bad compromises.. August 12, 2025.
• Seemay Chou — From systems operators to systems architects. August 12, 2025.
• Ben Reinhardt & Dan Recht — Science is an Extreme Phenomenon. August 5, 2025.
• Ben Reinhardt & Dan Recht — A New Scientific Method. July 30, 2025.
• Amitabh Chandra & Connie Xu — Where Discovery Happens: Research Institutions and Fundamental Knowledge in the Life Sciences. July 2025.
• UK Research and Innovation — A year in metascience. June 30, 2025.
• UK Metascience Unit / RoRI — The Past, Present and Future of UK Metascience (Annex). June 30, 2025.
• Ashlee Vance with Adam Marblestone & Anastasia Gamick — Fixing American Science. June 25, 2025.
• Patrick Joyce, Aldo de Pape & Aaron Weaver — Open & Decentralised Science at Proof of Talk 2025. June 22, 2025.
• Alex Obadia — Wanted: New Instruments to Fund BBNs. June 20, 2025.
• David Lang — Emboldening Scientific Curiosity | Experiment Foundation. June 18, 2025.
• Eric Gilliam — An Oral History Interview with ARIA CEO Ilan Gur. June 12, 2025.
• Eric Gilliam — Inside ARIA, the UK's Bet to Build Scientific Revolutions. June 12, 2025.
• Zach Winn — Former MIT researchers advance a new model for innovation. June 6, 2025.
• Seemay Chou — Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough. Why we're no longer funding journal publications. June 2, 2025.
• The Times Tech Podcast — Can the UK invent the next internet?. May 23, 2025.
• Matt Abbott, Marc Sedam & Paul Kohlhaas — Ship or Die 2025: University Research Driving Innovation. May 23, 2025.
• David Matthews — Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?. May 21, 2025.
• Kumar Garg — How philanthropy can fuel scientific innovation. May 15, 2025.
• SpineDAO interviewed by Ella McCarthy-Page of Molecule — How SpineDAO Is Redefining DeSci - From Back Pain to Blockchain. May 13, 2025.
• The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook. May 2025.
• Caleb Watney — Launching X-Labs for Transformative Science Funding. May 2025.
• Stuart Buck — Experimenting with NIH Funding. May 2025.
• Geoff Mulgan — Do we need a new generation of public institutions for science, technology and innovation?. May 6, 2025.
• Adam Marblestone, Anastasia Gamick, Mary Wang & Joseph Fridman — Field Notes on Moving Focused Research Organizations Forward. Fall 2025.
• Lisa Margonelli — Innovation's Hidden Scaffolds. Summer 2025.
• DeSciWorld — Science Needs More Context: Introducing Knowledge Network. April 28, 2025.
• Kumar Garg — Pathways to Progress. April 23, 2025.
• Pierre Azoulay, Raffaella Sadun & Daniella Scur — Before the Exodus? Young Scientists and the Future of US Science. NBER Working Paper 35330. 2025. Survey of 916 young biomedical scientists: likelihood of staying in the US fell from 93% to 72% following funding disruptions; foreign-born scientists showed the largest decline (−30.8 pp).
• Nicolai Søndergård — DeSci: The Future of Science or Pure Window Dressing?. March 20, 2025.
• Jen Nelles & Tim Vorley — The Applications of Metascience to Research and Innovation Systems. In Innovations in Innovation Policy, Edward Elgar. March 18, 2025.
• Elizabeth Gibney — AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement. Nature. March 7, 2025. LLMs used systematically to find errors in published papers; profiles researchers building detection tools and the error types they surface.
• Paul Kohlhaas and Tim Copeland — Bio Protocol on DeSci and the future of DAOs. March 2, 2025.
• Alexey Guzey & Jacob Trefethen — The Future of Science. February 28, 2025.
• Ciarán Murray — The Crossroads of DeSci: The Choice is Ours to Make. February 24, 2025.
• Adam Marblestone — How to Build Essential Technology. February 7, 2025.
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Unbundle the University. February 11, 2025.
• Binance — From Challenges to Opportunities: How DeSci Reimagines Science. February 9, 2025.
• Science|Business — Germany's Sprind innovation agency: what works, what does not. Science|Business. January 2025. Reports the independent five-year Fraunhofer ISI evaluation of SPRIND, finding it has drawn strong researcher interest and built a faster funding culture, with open questions about its independence and financial muscle.
• NFTevening — What Is DeSci? The Ultimate Guide to Decentralized Science. January 8, 2025.
• Daniel Roelfs — The Money in Scientific Publishing. May 9, 2024.
• Anna-Lena Schindl — Resource (Airtable).
• 2024
• Tyler Golato — TR01: From Institutions to Networks. December 2024.
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Spectech Lessons and Updated Hypotheses from 2024. January 14, 2025.
• Lukas Ruppert for Maelstrom Fund — Degen DeSci. January 3, 2025.
• Adam Marblestone — Automating Math. January 2025.
• Messari Crypto — DeSci Ecosystem Map. December 2024.
• Tom Kalil — Tom Kalil on Institutions for Innovation (with Matt Clancy). December 14, 2024.
• AuraSci — DeSci Fall Report. December 12, 2024.
• Ross Pomeroy — Can we automate science? Sam Rodriques is already doing it. November 18, 2024.
• Mark Hahnel — Innovating Academia From The Outside - The Web3 Solution to Academia's Peer Review Problem. November 14, 2024.
• Yen Tran — Billion-Dollar Race: LIFE AI's Breakthrough as Avalanche's Petabyte-Scale Layer 1. October 23, 2024.
• Dan Elton — A Defense of Peer Review. October 22, 2024.
• Eric Gilliam — A Scrappy Complement to FROs: Building More BBNs. October 16, 2024.
• Statecraft — How to Build the British ARPA. September 5, 2024.
• Abhishaike Mahajan — Things I learned talking to the new breed of scientific institution. August 26, 2024.
• Onchain Research — DeSci – (How) Will It Make Research Great Again?. August 16, 2024.
• Veronica Kirin — What is Decentralized Science (DeSci)?. July 19, 2024.
• Lukas Weidener & Cord Spreckelsen — Decentralized science (DeSci): definition, shared values, and guiding principles. July 17, 2024.
• Weixin Liang et al. — Can Large Language Models Provide Useful Feedback on Research Papers?. NEJM AI. July 17, 2024. GPT-4 feedback overlaps with human reviewer judgments at rates comparable to human-human agreement across 3,096 Nature papers and 1,709 ICLR submissions; 57% of researchers found it helpful.
• Foresight Institute Podcast — Stuart Buck - What is Good and Bad Science. May 30, 2024.
• Tyler Golato — Disrupting the Decline of Disruptive Science. May 28, 2024.
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Research Leaders' Playbook. Tools and tactics for leading coordinated research programs. April 4, 2024.
• Jocelynn Pearl and UltraRare — DeSci Wiki. Last update: January 1, 2024.
• 2023
• Jeffrey Ding — The diffusion deficit in scientific and technological power: re-assessing China's rise. Review of International Political Economy. March 2023.
• Erik Canton — Being right or fair. A portfolio approach to research funding. November 11, 2023.
• The DemystifySci Podcast — Science is a Strong Link Problem - Dr. Adam Mastroianni. August 31, 2023.
• John Paschkewitz & Dan Patt — No, We Don't Need Another ARPA. Fall 2023.
• Nadia Asparouhova — Early stage funding markets for science - an analysis. January 23, 2023.
• 2022
• Sarah Hamburg (a16z) — A Guide to DeSci, the Latest Web3 Movement. September 2, 2022.
• Michael Nielsen & Kanjun Qui — A Vision of Metascience. An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science. October 18, 2022.
• Scott Moore (Gitcoin) — DeSci: The case for Decentralised Science. August 29, 2022.
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Whence Systems Research? What the heck is systems research? Why is it important? Why are we bad at it? How could we do better?. August 11, 2022.
• Juan Benet — DeSci, Independent Labs, & Large Scale Data Science (video). July 20, 2022.
• Jocelynn Pearl — A Guide to Decentralized Biotech. April 20, 2022.
• Nadia Asparouhova — Understanding science funding in tech, 2011-2021. March 2, 2022.
• 2021 and earlier
• Benjamin Reinhardt — Shifting the impossible to the inevitable. A Private ARPA user manual. April 2021.
• Pierre Azoulay, Erica Fuchs, Anna P. Goldstein, and Michael Kearney — Funding Breakthrough Research: Promises and Challenges of the "ARPA Model". 2019.
• Christian Ketels et al. — Peer Review of the Danish R&I System: Ten Steps, and a Leap Forward. European Commission Horizon 2020 Policy Support Facility. 2019.
• Patrick Collison & Michael Nielsen — We Need a New Science of Progress. July 30, 2019.
• Patrick Collison & Michael Nielsen — Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck. November 16, 2018.
• Sönke Bartling & Benedikt Fecher — Blockchain for science and knowledge creation. August 14, 2016.
• Pierre Azoulay, Joshua S. Graff Zivin & Gustavo Manso — Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences. October 2009.
• Undated
• Ethereum — Decentralized science (DeSci).
• Vincent Weisser — Decentralized Science and Biotech & Metascience.
• José Luis Ricón — Research Funding category on his website.