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Join us for this in-person and live-streamed SSN Healthy Futures Seminar with Fallon Mody of the University of Melbourne

Science is not magically self-correcting – error detection as marginal work

Join us for this in-person and live-streamed SSN Healthy Futures Seminar with Fallon Mody of the University of Melbourne. Fallon will be in conversation with Victoria Stead and Mark Ziemann.

In-person attendees, please join us 15 minutes early, at 15:15, to share in some afternoon tea we can take into the venue.

Join in the conversation on Twitter with #SSNseminar #healthyfutures or on the Youtube livestream chat. Please select tickets for online or in-person accordingly.

Abstract

The trustworthiness of science is underpinned by the perception that science is self-correcting. That is, although science is error-ridden, the iterative, cumulative process of doing science results in the discovery and correction of errors as routine. However, the replication crisis facing many scientific disciplines has exposed the tenuousness of core activities that support scientific self-correction, notably that journal publishing systems incentivise novelty over rigour. Thus, a growing number of disciplines are facing a credibility crisis, where canonical claims cannot be trusted due to undetected errors, questionable research practices, and outright fraud. Yet correcting post publication errors is perceived as dirty work, and is afforded little recognition, reward or return. Error detectors have reputations as bullies, scientific McCarthyites, and methodological terrorists. In this talk, I will contextualise error detection within a wider discourse on the role of errors in science showing how and why error detection is relatively understudied. I will then draw on the work of the repliCATS project to demonstrate why post-publication error detection is urgent work, and then consider the extent to which historians of science can shape emerging dialogues through interdisciplinary metaresearch.

Speaker bio

Fallon Mody is a Research Fellow in the MetaMelb research group and the History & Philosophy of Science program at the University of Melbourne. Over the last five years, Fallon has worked on the repliCATS project, part of DARPA’s SCORE program. Fallon’s background is an interdisciplinary qualitative researcher. She completed her PhD dissertation on understanding post-war medical migration in historical perspective, and has worked on a number of mixed methods projects with the Centre for Biosecurity Risk Analysis applying qualitative research tools to inform a number of policy initiatives in partnership with Australia’s Federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. Prior to her PhD, Fallon worked as a science communicator for close to a decade. Notable roles include managing the Medicines for Children project for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (UK) providing high quality information for parent, carers and young people managing illness and chronic disease; and managing all STEMM outreach programs for the University of Melbourne. Fallon is a founding member of Association for Interdisciplinary Metaresearch and Open Science, and was recently elected Vice President.

Discussant bio

Victoria Stead is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University. Her own research engages themes of labour, race, coloniality, and place-making, with a geographic focus on Australian and the Pacific region. From 2020-2022 she was Chair of Deakin University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (and prior to that, Deputy Chair), and has scholarly interests in the histories, affordances and effects of University ethics and integrity regimes.

Mark Ziemann is a bioinformatician with over 10 years experience in the analysis of genomics data. His PhD was in plant molecular genetics (2006-2010), and post-doc was focused on applications of next generation sequencing in studying human epigenetics of complex diseases. From 2018-2023, he was a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics at Deakin University, teaching these topics and leading a successful independent research group in computational biology.