Vincent Traag
LightNews LightNews
vtraag.bsky.social
Vincent Traag
@vtraag.bsky.social
540 followers 370 following 80 posts
Senior researcher at CWTS, Leiden University. Computational social science, science studies, modelling & networks.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Vincent Traag
handle.invalid
📣 Upcoming seminar: 'Social and epistemic inequalities in science: insights from a multi-method study of forest research', with Nelius Boshoff (Stellenbosch University) and Susanne Koch @tum.de.

📅 Friday, 5.12.2025 | 3:00-4:15 PM (CET)
📌 Online & at CWTS

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/20...
Social and epistemic inequalities in science: insights from a multi-method study of forest research
Inequalities in science have come under scrutiny in the last decade. Different strands of science studies, including scientometrics and sociological works, have examined geographic and gender inequali...
www.universiteitleiden.nl
November 28, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
philipncohen.com
It's easy for some of you to just never use LLMs and just criticize people who do. I would like to be in that situation. But here I am, with my moderator volunteers, assessing hundreds of papers submitted to @socarxiv.bsky.social, trying to decide how to fairly judge whether to accept them. /1
November 2, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
socarxiv.bsky.social
2. We are developing a policy for AI-related work. We need a formal policy on AI-generated and LLM-assisted content. We have formed a committee of volunteers from our social science and library science networks to gather existing policies and decide what to do.
/5
pardon our dust while we improve - graphic
November 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
jayvanbavel.bsky.social
An adversarial collaboration on "cancel culture" reveals that many university students support restrictions on academic debate and research on campus, including the cancellation of talks, the revocation of teaching positions, and the removal of books.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 26, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
johnholbein1.bsky.social
Does blinding--i.e., concealing applicants' identities--reduce gender gaps in academic conference paper acceptances?

Nope!

Does blinding do anything?

It does! Blinding reduces gaps in acceptances by institution rank.

haruka-uchida.github.io/websitefiles...
November 26, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
manlius.bsky.social
Working in theory/data-driven social science/methods for computational social science?

The second Italian Conference on Computational Social Science is coming: follow @cs2italy.bsky.social for updates and visit our website cs2italy.org for details.

🚨 Abstract submission deadline: January 15, 2026
November 25, 2025 at 10:02 AM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
virginiagewin.bsky.social
Scientists: have you been the target of an online harassment campaign, doxxing, or weaponized FOIA requests? I'd like to talk to you about steps you had to take to protect your digital security for an upcoming Nature story. (You can be anonymous if necessary.)

RTs appreciated.
November 26, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
dancohen.org
New issue of my newsletter: "The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition" — One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved, and it's a good use of AI newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...
The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition
One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved
newsletter.dancohen.org
November 25, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
alexvespi.bsky.social
We’ve just released Epistorm-Mix, a new open dataset on how people in the U.S. mix across ages and settings in the post-COVID era.

📊 Contact-level data + contact matrices
Built for epidemic modeling & forecasting
Fully open data & code

🔗 www.epistorm.org/data/epistor...
Epistorm-Mix: Mapping Social Contact Patterns in the Post-Pandemic United States
Epistorm-Mix provides individual-level contact data and contacts patterns characterization relevant for the spread of respiratory infectious diseases within the US population.
www.epistorm.org
November 25, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
eliothiggins.bsky.social
Interested in working for Bellingcat? Bellingcat US is hiring a Director of Development and Partnerships, details here:
www.on-ramps.com/jobs/3518
Bellingcat US | Director of Development and Partnerships
Bellingcat is an independent community of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists who pioneered open source investigations tools. With precision and perseverance, Bellingcat exposes everyt...
www.on-ramps.com
November 21, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
handle.invalid
🎓 We are delighted to announce that our colleague @sarahderijcke.nl, Professor of Science, Technology & Innovation Studies at CWTS, has been appointed as Rector Magnificus of Leiden University.

We wish Sarah all the best in her new role at our university!

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...
Sarah de Rijcke appointed Rector Magnificus of Leiden University
Professor Sarah de Rijcke will become the new Rector Magnificus on the Executive Board of Leiden University on 15 January 2026. She will succeed Professor Hester Bijl, who will become Rector Magnificu...
www.universiteitleiden.nl
November 24, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
unileiden.bsky.social
Sarah de Rijcke wordt de nieuwe rector magnificus in het College van Bestuur van de Universiteit Leiden. De Rijcke volgt per 15 januari 2026 Hester Bijl op, die rector magnificus wordt aan de TU Delft.
Sarah de Rijcke benoemd tot rector magnificus van de Universiteit Leiden
Prof. dr. Sarah de Rijcke wordt de nieuwe rector magnificus in het College van Bestuur van de Universiteit Leiden. De Rijcke volgt per 15 januari 2026 prof. dr. ir. Hester Bijl op, die rector magnific...
www.universiteitleiden.nl
November 24, 2025 at 11:11 AM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
melikhovo.bsky.social
Just saw someone described as an "ontologist" and now I want Clinical Ontologist to be a job title.

Welcome to the Department of Clinical Ontology. Let's go over your chart. I see that you are. Are you still as you were or are you otherwise? For your case of being, I prescribe becoming.
November 21, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
loubezuidenhout.bsky.social
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-euro...
US Unesco withdrawal puts open science at risk - Research Professional News
Concentration of digital infrastructure in America creates global fragilities, say Louise Bezuidenhout and Jon Verriet
www.researchprofessionalnews.com
November 21, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
metaror.bsky.social
🎈 Time flies! Exactly one year ago today @rorinstitute.bsky.social and @aimosinc.bsky.social launched MetaROR, a platform to publish metaresearch through the publish-review-curate approach.

Over the course of the year, we published 28 articles reviewed by 59 different reviewers.

[1/3]
MetaROR Turns One - MetaROR
An exciting year of open, community-driven evaluation of metaresearch One [...]
metaror.org
November 21, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
netsciconf.bsky.social
𝗗𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝘁𝘀 & 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗮𝘁𝘇 will give their first-ever 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗸𝗲𝘆𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲 at NetSci 2026! Their groundbreaking work has shaped how we understand networks, & this session will be a highlight of NetSci’s 20th anniversary.
Call for abstracts: tinyurl.com/3tbj2v83
Call for satellites: tinyurl.com/42sru6kz
November 20, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
cs2italy.bsky.social
🔈 *Call for Participation* 🔈

Italian Conference on Computational Social Science – CS2Italy
May 19-21, 2026 in Torino, Italy

Premier venue for Computational Social Science in Italy: #sociology #polisci #economics #netsci #complexsystems ++

Submit your abstract by Jan 15: cs2italy.org

plz reshare
November 18, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
netscience.bsky.social
Latest out in Plos Comp Bio: "Epydemix: An open-source Python package for epidemic modeling with integrated approximate Bayesian calibration". A new package in Python for epidemic modeling. Paper: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol.... Website with lots of tutorials: www.epydemix.org
November 20, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
zachweinersmith.bsky.social
Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/stats-3
#smbc
November 18, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
jacoporazzauti.bsky.social
Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)
FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping
Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...
www.biorxiv.org
November 19, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
rensec.bsky.social
This is a very interesting paper but the empirical evidence presented for an increase in connectivity (in their Fig. 1E) is rather problematic. A little thread 👇(1/7):
pnas.org Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 22d
Is it possible that social media, which promised to connect the world, instead increased polarization? A model of human social dynamics predicts a sharp transition into a polarized state above a certain threshold of social connectivity. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Gym350XnNW8
Conceptual image showing a hand reaching out to a network of people icons. Stock photo.
November 18, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
pnas.org
Is it possible that social media, which promised to connect the world, instead increased polarization? A model of human social dynamics predicts a sharp transition into a polarized state above a certain threshold of social connectivity. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/Gym350XnNW8
Conceptual image showing a hand reaching out to a network of people icons. Stock photo.
November 6, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
danicajdillion.bsky.social
Americans are growing more socially isolated and politically divided.

Our new paper in Applied Network Science suggests these two forms of disconnection may be linked. People with denser, more connected social networks often feel less partisan animosity.

🧵
November 13, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
jlrohmann.bsky.social
BERLIN + CAUSAL GRAPHS = HAPPINESS.
Agree?
Follow: bsky.app/profile/appl...
Spoiler: Edition #3 in the making for Q2 2026! Stay tuned!
Applied Causal Graphs 2026 workshop teaser - stay tuned!
November 12, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Vincent Traag
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM