News from Rippling Ideas

We’re actively looking for funding to keep the Preprints in Motion podcast running in 2026, check out our call here. Also keep any eye out on our socials as we’ll be running #preprintadvent again in December.

Preprints & Open Science

Preprints in Motion

Latest activity from Rippling Ideas

• How to post a preprint [YouTube]

• Why should you post preprints [YouTube]

• Our curated list of preprint servers in the Life Science

Selected News Roundup

• openRxiv Day: envisioning scientific communication as a connected ecosystem

  • I am 100% onboard for what openRxiv are planning and their vision for the future. I genuinely believe that this is the best path forwards

• Enabling options for review: from training and transparency to author-centered AI tools

  • qed is a very interesting platform that is focussed on helping authors rather than being a quality control step which absolutely gets our support. This is a very exciting development and a big step towards expanding what feedback actually is. This did cause a lot of discussion on social media, with many positioning this as “review” instead of “feedback”. More in The Scientist.

• LSE & qed pilot

  • Within days of the above news, Life Science Editors announced their own pilot with qed

• For Equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing

  • Excellent resource for those just starting out

• The Drain of Scientific Publishing

  • This is the sequel to the Strain on Scientific Publishing, which we covered on the podcast this year. Also covered here.

• The withdrawal of the US from UNESCO: What does this mean for Open Science?

• Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category

• Preregistration Isn’t the Chief Executive of Science, It’s a Small Part of the Quality Control Department

• Updated Plan S strategy

  • I’m not overly confident in this, although the direction change is needed it does feel somewhat toothless. I’m not particularly keen to see PRC explicitly mentioned - for reasons I’ve been vocal about enough. See this covered in Science which additional comments from others.

• A survey of open science attitudes and behaviors among US pharmacy faculty

• Preprint policies across journals and publishers in ecology and evolutionary biology

• Bonfire Open Science

  • A brand new network for Open Science from Bonfire

• Open Source Power

• Understanding DOIs for preprints

• Creative commons licenses and copyright may not stop academic work being used to train AI

  • With publishers profiting from licencing academic work for training AI this is something that may just come to a head next year.

• 2026 PREreview Champions - Apply NOW

  • This is enormously recommended!

• Strategic Analysis of the Scholarly communications Landscape

Academic Culture

Selected News Roundup

• Pressure to publish is rising as research time shrinks, finds survey of scientists

• How responsible is Clarivate’s “responsible” impact assessment framework?

  • The SCOPE framework is great (& surprising that DORA didn’t create it), if you’re not familiar with it already

• Excellence, culture and assessment are inseparable

• Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration

  • I’m not a fan of yet more declarations, even if I do agree with the points within. We really need some coordinated effort from the many, many, existing declarations. We also need more community and advocacy organisations dedicated to working on the things these declarations keep…declaring. Change comes from effort.

• OUP acquires Karger's long tail

  • “Acquiring the Karger journals will provide OUP with many more downstream transfer destinations, helping OUP to publish more of the articles that get rejected by their higher impact journals” - nothing more needs saying.

• Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line

  • Yet more evidence in favour of a lottery system.

• To reform universities, first tackle global rankings

• Can a CC License Constrain Fair Use or Other Copyright Limitations or Exemptions?

• Scholar Labs: An AI Powered Scholar Search [check it out]

• Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search [Paper]

  • This is important evidence in how LLM use impacts learning

• Libraries and Open Science: Overlaps and Gaps with the Research Community

• ‘Web of incentives’ in research funding limit academic freedom

• ERC’s new €7m Plus Grants open to researchers at any career stage

  • This has been compared (unfavourably) to HHMI’s funding strategy which is very interesting. Too much money does seem to be wasteful past a certain point.

Trust in Research

Selected News Roundup

• This label will put your journal’s research integrity in black and white

• Science and the crisis of trust

• The effect of seeing scientists as intellectually humble on trust in scientists and their research

• Bug in Springer Nature metadata may be causing ‘significant, systemic’ citation inflation

• Self-citation patterns among researchers

• BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers?

  • A strong warning against relying on AI for peer review. This links very well with our best practices for preprint review services that use AI

• Do acts to correct the scientific record need to move out of the shadows?

• Peer Review Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

  • a very humanities-focussed view that to my ears sounds like “preprint your work”

• Trust Markers: Interpreting the trustworthiness of an ORCID record

  • Provenance of records - from authors to data - is only going to become more important.

• Why We Shouldn’t Blindly Trust Peer Reviewed Articles - And How AI Can Help

  • I struggle so much with the messaging from DeSci. In one post, peer review is essential, in another it shouldn’t be implicitly trusted (which doesn’t seem to fit with their broader comms actually). This is an org that seem focussed entirely on themselves, not doing good because it’s the right thing to do.

Get involved

Join our tribe!

We’re actively seeking funders and clients, currently developing some proposals and projects. We’re also looking for collaborators and volunteers - we want you as part of our tribe. So please share this newsletter with those you know and recommend us as widely as possible.

What’s coming up?

We are developing our first online course (preprints 101) due to release early 2026. We’re also putting together a “state of preprinting” report for release in Jan 2026, which we are extremely excited about.

See you again next month!