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2026
Science/AAAS — China Now Tops the U.S. in R&D Spending by One Key Measure. August 7-8, 2026. Japan's NISTEP Science and Technology Indicators 2026 finds China's 2024 R&D spending reached ¥97.1 trillion (about $615bn, up 13.1% year on year), overtaking the US's ¥95.3 trillion for the first time and making China the leader on all three of the report's core measures: paper volume, high-quality-paper citations, and total R&D investment.
Inside Higher Ed — Star Professor Resigns After Cambridge Opens Investigation. August 7, 2026. Sociologist Jason Arday, Cambridge's youngest-ever Black professor, resigned "with immediate effect" from his post and Jesus College fellowship after the university opened a formal investigation into the plagiarism allegations and disputed personal claims that Times Higher Education had reported on, then shelved, the previous month.
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 with staff calling the situation an "existential crisis."
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, Google backing it as a founding investor; the same day Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day Google DeepMind leadership to become Alphabet's Chief Scientist and DeepMind's Chair.
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, 20 in the UK and Europe, 8 in the Middle East and North Africa, 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, explicitly framed as a response to OSTP's July 2026 "Science: A New Golden Age" report.
Science/AAAS — NIH Director Bhattacharya Kills More Health-Disparities Grants. August 4, 2026. NIH terminated a $9.6 million, five-year University of Pittsburgh grant studying cognitive aging and Alzheimer's risk among Black residents of low-income Pittsburgh neighbourhoods, citing its health-disparities framing, after roughly $7 million had already been spent.
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; unlike the failed 2025 "Compact," it carries no funding conditions or enforcement mechanism.
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 holding appointments with, receiving support from, or collaborating with any entity on seven federal restricted-party lists, a domestic collaboration prohibition broader than the earlier Pentagon Section 1286 list.
Retraction Watch — Cambridge Professor's Plagiarism Allegations: Times Higher Education Exclusive Shelved. July 27, 2026. THE dropped a substantially reported plagiarism investigation after the subject retained a defamation law firm, a concrete case of legal pressure suppressing research-integrity journalism.
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, naming Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong as elite civilian universities are barred from DoD-funded collaboration 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. Building on Ashish Uppala's observation that the journal has bundled four jobs since 1665 (registration, certification, dissemination, archival), Hahnel notes the internet made three of them nearly free, leaving certification as the scarce one, so once anyone can generate a plausible analysis in minutes, trust, verification, and provenance become the product. He describes "datasetpapers," versioned and forkable executable research objects generated from open datasets with credit to the original depositor designed in, separates prestige into re-executable trust and editorially-guessed significance (better judged "on read" than "on write"), and warns that models now reaching for pre-published data make the researcher's control over the moment of dissemination the real battleground.
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 (project timelines, level of user input, discretionary budget, career incentives and personnel models, revenue strategy, degree of focus, organisation and team size, governance and project selection, and openness and IP), with how to measure each and how they interact. Argues that as FROs, Arc, and NSF's X-Labs proliferate and a coming wave of AI-fortune philanthropy needs somewhere to go, 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: translating it into agency structure, funding models, and hiring. On metascience units, it warns that gaps in authority, funding, and professionalization could undercut the idea, and recommends an interagency subcommittee to approve agency metascience pilots, a fellowship embedding term-limited experts inside agencies, and a designated testbed agency for new grantmaking approaches. On the Genesis Mission it stresses that AI-for-science depends on curated data and benchmarks (as AlphaFold did), and it flags that OMB's proposed Uniform Guidance revisions, which would make publication costs unallowable, cut against the report's call for a lighter, faster enterprise.
Columbia Postdoctoral Workers (UAW Local 4100) — Columbia postdocs ratify new contract, averting strike. July 26, 2026. A new three-year contract raises the minimum postdoc salary to $70,000 with 24% cumulative raises, a $500,000 hardship fund, and anti-bullying protections; management settled before a strike-authorization vote could proceed.
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). Also relays first-hand skepticism that the DOE National Labs have drifted toward career-ist, marginal publication and heavy administrative burden, citing decade-long delays at FermiLab's Mu2e and the NSTX-U fusion device still described to Congress as "world-leading" despite being shut down since 2016.
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 what may be the largest contraction in US science funding in history: the Department of Defense's roughly 70% real-dollar cut to university research contracts after 1970, as the Vietnam-era consensus for military-funded research collapsed. Using a new dataset linking DoD and NSF grants to scientists, PhDs, publications, and patents, it finds that more DoD-exposed universities and fields saw lasting declines in publications and PhD training, early-career scientists leaving the academy, eroded US leadership in those fields, and reduced downstream innovation, a natural experiment with obvious bearing on today's proposed cuts.
Leya Mohsin — The Science of Moonshots: Using Evidence to Design Transformative Initiatives. FAS. July 2026. Argues "moonshot" has become a tired marketing term rather than a specific program structure, and recovers what the genuine article requires: a clear end goal and path to it (as in Apollo or the Manhattan Project), and governance that concentrates decision-making authority with accountability to a defined endpoint (as at DARPA). Makes the case that metascience should study not just which problems are ripe for moonshots but how to run them.
Dan Turner-Evans — Picking the Right Challenges for Genesis Mission. Institute for Progress. July 2026. Argues the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, an ambitious effort to accelerate AI in science, spreads itself across far too many challenges (26) to function as a real moonshot, and should instead narrow to a small set of clearly defined goals in areas where the federal government adds unique value: basic science, classified research, and national-coordination problems like the electrical grid. Published just before the White House expanded Genesis further.
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 entire National Science Board and to let political appointees cancel grants that conflict with presidential priorities. Grounded in the history of US science governance, Mills argues that while the administration's actions are overly aggressive, Congress should resist retrenchment because 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, absorbing the social-unification roles that churches, the military, corporations, and mass media shed after 1970, on top of a hybrid British-teaching and German-research model cross-subsidised by undergraduate tuition. Mass enrolment (the bachelor's-degree share of 25-to-29-year-olds rose from 16% in 1970 to 40% by 2020) overloaded an institution never designed for the job and drove grade inflation and looser standards, and enrolment has since plateaued and fallen.
Carlos Arleo — Can AI tell if your research is actually new?. Go Meta! (RoRI). July 24, 2026. An independent researcher 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. The approach treats AI as an instrument forced to reason inside a fixed rubric rather than a flattering conversationalist: full-text analysis, real-time verification of the paper's actual citations against OpenAlex, Crossref, and Semantic Scholar, and scoring by a panel of 5 to 10 AI judges across uniqueness, tension, synthesis, and coherence, bounded by hardcoded caps and an integrity screen. It is explicitly a proxy, uncalibrated against human experts, and now in open beta.
Mark Rubin — Feminist Metascience and Feminist Open Science. Critical Metascience. July 24, 2026. Introduces a forthcoming Gender & Society special issue (Munsch and Reyes, eds.) defining feminist metascience as the study of how gender and intersecting power relations shape how knowledge is produced, evaluated, circulated, and corrected, and feminist open science as transparency attentive to care, protection, and risk. Surveys the issue's articles, including Pownall on women as the first open scientists, Lee on gendered novelty claims across disciplines, and King and Lockhart on gender and race gaps in green open access.
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; DOE selects 278 AI-for-science projects across 50 states, the largest response to any single DOE funding call to date.
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, building on earlier exploratory grants to Stanford's Hoover Institution and Vanderbilt's Institute of National Security.
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 (8 tenured) plus 2 academic professionals and closes two departments, driven by a $35 million two-year budget shortfall; the university's AAUP chapter calls it the worst layoff round in its history.
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. Notes the heavy emphasis on AI as changing how science is done, the pervasive anxiety about China, the embrace of "novel performer" models like Focused Research Organizations and of metascience as controlled experimentation (predicted to go mainstream within five years), and flags the conspicuous absence of climate and biosecurity from a document built on a national-security throughline.
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. Written as the White House OSTP report endorsed the idea, it details what such units should test (fast grants, multi-stage review, golden tickets, person-based grants, AI-assisted review), why they should sit in leadership offices with authority to mandate pilots, and why they should not become external grantmaking or compliance offices.
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. It recommends refocusing support on individual scientists over legacy institutions, diversifying funding mechanisms beyond consensus peer review, creating agile research organisations (X-Labs and expanded ARPA-like entities), and establishing metascience units in science agencies to run controlled experiments on how research is funded. A companion FY2028 R&D Priorities Memorandum directs agencies to submit implementation action plans within 90 days.
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 Programmable Cloud Lab test-bed nodes, AI-enabled autonomous laboratories, in partnership with Astera (which adds over $20M) as part of the Genesis Mission. Astera's role is to standardise metadata and data across the network and push open science, AI-readiness of data, and rapid publication of data and results, turning the self-driving-lab model into federal-scale infrastructure.
Reinvent Science — The Scientific Literature is Poisonous to LLMs. Reinvent Science. July 21, 2026. Argues the modern scientific literature is uniquely toxic training data, scattered across honest-versus-dishonest and right-versus-wrong quadrants with papers routinely masquerading as another kind of work. Cites a 2024 study (Longpre et al.) finding that removing ArXiv, PhilPapers, and NIH ExPorter from training data improved an LLM's benchmark performance and reduced toxic output, and notes citation and authorship metadata have been gamed of their signal. The deeper point: scientists judge reliability through informal social networks that AI agents cannot access, leaving AI-for-science to reconstruct that missing "social metadata" by uncomfortable means.
Tom Kalil — Kalil's Corner: The Role of Philanthropy in Identifying and Pursuing AI Moonshots. SCI PHI (Renaissance Philanthropy). July 21, 2026. The first issue of a new SCI PHI newsletter 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. It lays out concrete levers, including Goldilocks-specificity problem definition, shared datasets and leaderboards that harness AI talent, bilingual (technical plus domain) teams via venture studios, rigorous real-world evaluations, and incentive prizes and advance market commitments.
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" long granted to F-1 and J-1 visa holders, replacing it with a fixed admission period of up to four years, effective September 15, 2026; requires formal extension filings with USCIS and cuts the F-1 grace period from 60 to 30 days.
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 after 19 years and over $48 billion in cumulative giving, a rupture in one of the largest philanthropic relationships in science and global health.
World Weather Attribution — Fossil fuel emissions have rapidly worsened European heatwaves in just a few decades. July 13, 2026. A rapid attribution study (Imperial College London, LSHTM, UK Met Office) finding the June 2026 heatwave's temperatures would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change; 45% of European cities breached dangerous heat-humidity thresholds during the event.
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 (rising to DKK 186 million later), a contradiction researchers call out directly.
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, 2024 Nobel laureate and AlphaFold co-creator John Jumper left DeepMind for Anthropic and Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer left Google for OpenAI, the clearest individual illustrations yet of AI labs pulling decorated researchers out of traditional institutions.
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 to Astera's metascience essay competition, targeting the useful science that gets done but never shared: null results, dead-end datasets, methodologies, and code left out of journal articles. It offers life-sciences graduate researchers flat-fee $10,000 contracts (at least five, six-week terms) to publish these hidden artifacts openly in non-legacy venues, arguing the stakes have risen because AI-driven discovery increasingly depends on comprehensive, machine-readable data. Proposals due August 21, 2026; judged by Steven Moss and Seemay Chou.
Fahd Husain, Antonia Theodorakopoulou, James Custer & Tom Kalil — Charting AI's Role in Scientific Discovery. Renaissance Philanthropy. July 15, 2026. A landscape study (with support from Google.org) of where AI is becoming a structural enabler of scientific discovery and where it is not, arguing progress so far is broad but shallow and that the binding constraint is shifting from model capability to data infrastructure. It examines five domains chosen for leverage (structural biology, mathematics, neurodegenerative diseases, climate science, and autonomous/self-driving labs) and invites researchers, tooling builders, funders, and policymakers (including AI skeptics) to contribute, with a public landscape report due late 2026.
Conor Griffin & Don Wallace — Conjecture Machines: AI Agents and the New Validation Bottleneck in Science. Google DeepMind. July 15, 2026. Drawing on interviews with Google DeepMind researchers, the piece argues that AI agents (Co-Scientist, AlphaEvolve, Aletheia) are becoming "conjecture machines" that make hypotheses and candidate solutions abundant and cheap, while validation stays physical, institutional, and slow, so refutation becomes the binding constraint. It sets out four priorities for funders and policymakers: ensure all scientists can access frontier agents, make national datasets agent-ready, invest in experimental and automated-lab infrastructure to clear the validation bottleneck, and update peer review for an era in which writing quality no longer signals a scientist's judgement.
Andy Stirling — Illuminating Neglected Uncertainties: How Metascience Can Help Rather Than Hinder Democracy. Go Meta! (RoRI). July 15, 2026. A critical-metascience essay arguing that the field's hardest problems come less from too little evidence than from asking too little about what evidence cannot settle. Stirling presses three issues to the centre of metascience: uncertainty (make sensitivity and plural interpretations central rather than buried in appendices), directionality (any evidence base supports multiple justified directions, so evaluation should compare pathways rather than defend one, and a road map with a single road is a warning sign), and democracy (technocratic "follow the data" framing shares habits with authoritarianism, and public engagement should surface legitimate disagreement rather than manufacture consensus).
Alex Shintaro Araki — The Race to Allocate One Trillion Dollars in Philanthropic Capital. Alex's Substack. July 14, 2026. Argues that imminent frontier-AI-lab IPOs (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic) will mint thousands of new millionaires holding over $1 trillion concentrated in San Francisco, and that philanthropy is unprepared. These EA-adjacent "post-2026 donors" arrive opinionated about cost-effectiveness; roughly half the capital will default to donor-advised funds and EA allocators, and the binding constraint on the rest is absorptive capacity and talent — too few "philanthropy-shaped problems" and skilled capital allocators or "General Managers" to steward billions into ambitious new institutions (research institutes, FROs, X-Labs). Proposes tiered engagement models by wealth level and points to Renaissance Philanthropy's Big if True Science accelerator as a talent pipeline.
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, roughly 2% of NSF's budget (up to $1.5 billion, milestone-structured), as a valuable experiment that scales the philanthropically de-risked Focused Research Organization model of team-based, goal-oriented science. Argues it is funded through the TIP Directorate's Other Transactions Authority rather than siphoned from research grants, situates it in a lineage from HHMI and the Allen Institute to Arc and Convergent Research, engages Pierre Azoulay's skepticism, and calls for lightweight, outcome-oriented accountability.
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 it will go fully open access in 2027 with a mandatory $2,990 article-processing charge, calling the move "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 (R-Maine) 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; by the rule's July 13 close, nearly 100,000 public comments had been submitted.
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 (DKK 600M) over six years; seven of nine consortia are led by researchers outside Denmark (Netherlands, Hungary, UK, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Switzerland), each still requiring a Danish partner institution — the first Challenge Programme cycle since the scheme opened to European main applicants.
Noah Smith — MAGA's Attack on Science Is Even Worse Than It Looks. Noahpinion. July 10, 2026. Argues that the postwar US scientific enterprise — research universities, federal grants, public-to-private spinoffs, built by scientist-bureaucrats like Vannevar Bush — was an engine of American preeminence now under an unprecedented Trump-administration attack of funding cuts and ideological review. Marshals Pew and other polling to counter the right-wing myth of collapsing public trust: most Americans, and even most Republicans, still trust scientists and support more science spending, with the loss of faith concentrated among MAGA Republicans.
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: the postwar system is optimised for bureaucratic legibility (project grants, PI labs, institutional isomorphism) at the cost of vitality. The state should act less like a central planner and more like a gardener cultivating a diverse ecosystem — supporting many organisational forms (FROs, permanent institutes like Janelia and the Allen Institute, public-interest labs, scientific-commons institutions), funding infrastructure and replication, and using selection mechanisms beyond peer review (DARPA program managers, lotteries, people-not-projects, prizes).
Mohana Basu — Think preprints are unreliable? Analysis of 70,000 studies might change your mind. Nature. July 10, 2026. A bioRxiv study by Yin and Rust used a language model to compare 72,644 biomedical preprints with their published versions, finding about 90% of main conclusions unchanged or only minorly revised after peer review, and that revisions more often made claims more cautious than more confident. Preprinted papers were also retracted at roughly half the rate of comparable non-preprinted ones, though the authors caution the comparison is observational.
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." Proposals span funding mechanisms (person vs. project, blinded review, golden tickets, partial randomisation, grant size, length, and concentration caps), scientific culture (null-results mandates, red-teaming consensus), team and career design (early-career funding, independent trainee fellowships, mentorship), AI (fraud detection, AI-assisted review, autonomous-lab platforms), and institutions (geographic distribution, conferences, sabbaticals, prizes vs. grants, forecasting tournaments). Framed as a menu for the new metascience offices at federal agencies, or a dedicated lab or fund studying inquiry itself.
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 with only volunteer reviewers, following mass retractions of entire conference proceedings.
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; the grant success rate fell from 21% (2024) to 11% (2025), and a new rule funding multiyear grants as a single lump sum is projected to eliminate roughly 970 competing grants.
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 (8% above $2M/student, 4% for $750k–2M) took effect, estimated to cost Harvard ~$368M/year and Yale, Princeton, and Stanford comparable sums; the same law capped graduate borrowing at $20,500/year and $100,000 total.
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 on strengthening science in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Argues the returns to LMIC R&D are high (Embrapa raised Brazilian agricultural productivity by 110%, with a benefit-cost ratio of 17) but the evidence on what works is fragmented, under-visible, and weakly connected to decision-making, with few institutions synthesising it for policymakers. Calls for programs designed to be studied, more comparative work given how context-dependent "what works" is, and argues AI will not remove the need for local scientific capacity.
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 (PhD students and postdocs), fielded after the early-2025 changes to US science funding, documents a sharp shift in sentiment: only about half now say they are likely to remain in academia (down 22 percentage points from six months earlier), the fraction likely to stay in the US fell 21 points, and satisfaction with having pursued a science PhD fell 16 points, evidence of a possible exodus of the next generation of principal investigators.
Pierre Azoulay — In (Qualified) Defense of the Research Project Grant. Science. June 11, 2026. A skeptical response to the reform push (crystallised by NSF's $1.5 billion X-Labs) to move from investigator-initiated project grants toward independent, block-funded institutes. Concedes the RPG's real pathologies (preliminary-data demands, application bloat, halved success rates, a fundraising treadmill that favours safe, incremental work) but argues X-Labs' true parentage is not Bell Labs (the research arm of a regulated monopoly) but the continental model, Max Planck, CNRS, and the DOE national labs, which already do much of this at $18 billion a year and carry their own bureaucratic ossification. Defends what the RPG gets right structurally: portability that gives scientists bargaining power, multiple funding doors, a portfolio large enough for real experimentation, and the bundling of research with graduate training. "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 that the classical research model (Humboldt, Bush, Merton, peer review) is not in crisis but in motion, pushed toward stronger societal coupling by more systemic challenges, more strategic and portfolio-based funding, and tighter economic frames. Contrasts the Nordic model of publicly funded universities with limited reserves against endowment-rich institutions, notes the growing role of private foundations, and asks how to strengthen societal relevance without undermining academic autonomy.
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: the contrast between hype cycles and mature "strongholds" that lose funding once the novelty fades, the argument that prioritisation is not distribution, the fragmentation of funding instruments and the need to invest in the couplings between them, and why mission-oriented innovation stays rhetoric unless grant authority and resources are genuinely concentrated.
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 (88 contributors): 49.4% of surveyed Danish university researchers report fearing, having been threatened with, or having experienced reprisals for speaking up; 5–7% report direct pressure to delay, alter, or withhold findings.
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 multidisciplinary field that steps back to question metascience's own assumptions, methods, and solutions (the near-canonical claims about QRPs, p-hacking, HARKing, publication bias, and low replication). Contends that metascience is dominated by an activist open-science reform movement prone to collective bias, and that external, paradigmatic criticism would improve its objectivity and epistemic diversity.
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 publicly published essays diagnosing concrete structural bottlenecks in their fields. The dominant theme was coordination failure (shared infrastructure for data, methods, and null results), followed by data quality, training gaps, incomplete research artifacts, and AI-readiness; Astera awarded eight essays and is sharing the public catalogue with funders and policymakers.
Ben Reinhardt & Dan Recht — Pivot Your Career at Age 50. Reinvent Science. June 30, 2026. Argues that, as leading scientists' healthspans lengthen, Planck's principle ("science advances funeral by funeral") threatens to slow progress, so scientists should make a dramatic pivot to a new field between ages 50 and 60. Proposes making mid-career field changes the celebrated norm, including a CAREER-style award for scientists who switch fields.
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: bring higher education back together with research, assign each university around five disciplinary strength areas backed by hypothecated “stability” block grants (with a geographic lens to avoid regional cold spots), and cancel the REF. A concrete instantiation of the block-funding-by-institutional-profile argument.
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 asks whether our research and innovation system is equipped for a future of many unknowns. The vision is a more diverse ecosystem of institutions and new social practices for science; internationally a field of more than 200 organisations is already working out what that takes in practice.
ARIA — Clouds, clouds, everywhere. ARIA. June 26, 2026. ARIA's June update: new seed funding calls (cyber-physical trust, climate resilience, and a multi-agent AI safety call with Schmidt Sciences and Google DeepMind), plus a feature on Earth Compress, a £7M project (grown from a £500k opportunity seed) 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 (up to thirty years before a major prize) by tracking bursts of new, influential, cross-topic papers across ~50,000 PubMed topics. Proposes a funding experiment, backing half of predicted breakthrough topics at random and comparing outcomes, while warning against over-concentration that would starve the diverse portfolio from which future breakthroughs grow.
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 (Embrapa BCR 17) but evidence is fragmented, there is no dedicated LMIC science think tank, and the effective customer is shifting from USAID to European governments, multilaterals, and philanthropy.
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: decentralise regulation, guarantee 150 ECTS research time, experiment with thesis formats beyond three articles, and introduce new formats including an entrepreneur PhD and a welfare-sector PhD.
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: NIH is held roughly flat (about $48.8B including ARPA-H, a $100M increase), while NSF faces a 20% cut in the House bill, down from the 54.7% cut in the President's Budget Request. The bill also adds language on F&A cost reform, reprogramming-notification requirements, and restrictions on firearms and gender-affirming-care research.
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 — industry R&D at 66% (vs. 77% in the US and China), patent citations at 3.6% (vs. 5.8% and 5.0%). EU is allocating €900M to attract researchers and targeting €175–200B for the next Horizon cycle.
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; proposes funders shift to block funding based on institutional strategic profiles and quality assurance shift from peer review to “peer engagement.”
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 the design of organisations and institutions; finds strong analysis, weak prescriptive synthesis, and no academic field or centre that takes institutional design as its primary object. Framed around the Institutional Architecture Lab (TIAL).
Policy Atlas & Aidan K. — Five lessons from building evidence-strength scoring into an AI policy tool. Substack. June 22, 2026. On using LLMs to classify systematic reviews vs. observational studies for a Nesta-backed policy evidence tool; five practical lessons about reliability, transparency, and domain specificity when embedding AI-as-judge in evidence synthesis pipelines.
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; geosciences faces 60% cuts, SBE is effectively dissolved, and NSF appears to violate a directive capping per-directorate cuts at 5%.
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 (effective August 1, 2026): the honorarium-paid clinical positions of clinical lecturer and clinical professor are opened to professional groups beyond physicians, subject to qualification requirements and concurrent clinical employment assessed by each university.
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” — collective capabilities held by trusted coalitions; proposes a Nordic Quantum Buyers’ Club as an embedded demand mechanism addressing the missing-buyer failure mode that has undermined DARPA imitators.
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; new science chapter documents AI's expanding role in biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy; entry-level software developer employment for workers 22–25 has fallen ~20% since 2024 — the first white-collar job category to show measurable AI-driven contraction.
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. Clark Kerr's "multiversity" — the bundled research-teaching-credentialing university — is coming apart, with AI rendering obsolete the shared knowledge-transmission technologies that held it together. What replaces it is disaggregation: pure-research centres, residential coming-of-age institutions, and honest skills-training, each doing one thing.
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 — driven by complex challenges, strategic funding, and innovation expectations — creating real dilemmas between autonomy, strategic direction, and institutional identity, especially for Nordic universities without large financial reserves.
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: many fields lack both the right kinds of data and the incentives to produce it as a public good, so progress rests on shaky data foundations. The argument the later Charting AI landscape study builds on.
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.
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 (literature extraction, protein-structure models, target identification) while adoption stalls in messier, regulated, generative-design territory. Names data quality and availability, alongside IP, security, and compliance, as the top reasons AI pilots fail, and describes a "builder" phase in which leading organisations reshape their data environments rather than run isolated pilots.
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 the medicines we have today would have been affected if the permanent NIH budget had been 40% smaller, motivated by 2025 grant disbursements running more than 40% below the prior year and a proposed 39.3% FY2026 cut. Finds that cuts of this magnitude could affect a large share of drug approvals, tracing the downstream impact of NIH funding on drug-linked research.
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, Germany's federal agency for breakthrough innovation: it has drawn strong researcher interest and built a faster funding culture (decisions roughly two weeks after application), with projects attracting follow-on funding from agencies and venture capital. Open questions remain about its independence from political control and whether it has the financial muscle and time horizon to sustain genuinely disruptive technologies, which the evaluation says is still too early to judge.
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.