The turmoil surrounding Elon Musk’s handling of his Twitter takeover has renewed concern over the perils of a public good in private hands (Nature 613, 19–21 (2023); see also Nature 614, 602; 2023). Another form of scholarly public discourse is also owned by profit-driven entities — academic publishers. We propose an answer to both problems. The most-discussed solution for Twitter is migration to Mastodon (see Science 378, 583–584; 2022), a social-technology platform that communicates over a distributed network of servers (‘instances’ in the ‘Fediverse’), akin to e-mail, and is immune to private takeover. Similarly federated solutions exist for journal articles (B. Brembs et al. Preprint at Zenodo https://doi.org/gn6jjc; 2021), but free social interaction is still hampered by inertia in scholarly organizations — in particular, resistance by scholarly societies that rely heavily on publication income. There is now a golden opportunity for every scholarly society to implement a Mastodon instance for anyone interested in their field. If the academic community can create a public resource protected from private interests, it could become a model for bringing the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — into the Fediverse. Nature 614, 624 (2023) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00486-3

> Hi, I'm currently working on an assignment regarding p-hacking. I want to make the point that p-hacking can have real-life consequences, as the data being put out there could be applied in the wrong way. I already have an example of how p-hacking led to the WHO canceling their distribution of malaria medication. > > But, I need a specific example from psychology, and I can't find anything. I find plenty of papers explaining that p-hacking is common and why it's a problem, but no concrete examples of studies where p-hacking was discovered. Does anyone have an example in mind? Or maybe a study whose results have been questioned? > > Thank you in advance!

Sign-ups to FediScience.org, the Mastodon server for publishing scientists, have exploded today. We probably had more sign-ups today than in 2022 before. Like with email you have to pick a server to sign-up and then you can talk to (almost) everyone. Here is a list of options for people interested in science, academia, GLAM, etc. https://fediscience.org/server-list.html

Translated versions available in Spanish, French, Magyar, Portuguese and Chinese.

[Lofi published](https://reddit.com/r/Open_Science/comments/y7urrl/does_open_science_necessarily_mean_public_access/) this on Reddit asking: > I came across this paper - https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.202255841 (through r/Open_Access_tracking) > > It made me think: Most of the discourse I know about research materials and open science is centered around the idea of public access. > > But maybe public access is not vital? What do you think about providing controlled, on-demand access? > I mean, public access is preferable, but in practice, public access deters some scientists (due to various reasons, not necessarily IP as the paper assumes), and so we are ending with no access at all. > Perhaps providing some access is better than nothing. > > What do you think - would society benefit from such on-demand access or should we insist on public access only?

Open Neuroscience is organising a small session on October 26th 18:00 UK time to discuss what are good ways/best infrastructure to manage content (ie how do we make it interoperable, user friendly, easy to move/copy/replicate, etc). They will host Jonny Saunders to learn about their amazing efforts in curating information with wikis (eg Auto-Pi-lot Wiki) and other distributed infrastructure systems, and follow that up with an open chat/discussion session. [You can sign up here](https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIvcemhqz4pE9xi_tNopaXwXt0hNJa3pjPF).