Seminar: "Metascience morning" with James Wilsdon and Ludo Waltman

Science is done when we write up our work and when our plans and projects are funded. But funding and publishing are under every increasing strain. What pressures do they face, and how should we respond? Building on the Metascience Moment in Barcelona (2-4 November) two of the leading thinkers in this exciting and rapidly growing field, James Wilsdon and Ludo Waltman, will be talking at 11am at ICTA-UAB on Friday 6th November, as per the abstracts below. Please ​sign up using this form​. Lunch will be provided.

 

Title: "The Future of Scientific Funding and Publishing. A Metascience Morning at ICTA-UAB"

Speakers: James Wilsdon and Ludo Waltman

 

• Date: Friday, November 6th, 2026
• Time: From 11h to 14h, including lunch
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 & Z/023) ICTA-UAB
• ​Link to Registration

 

Conjectures are cheap, decisions are not: from push to pull in research funding

James Wilsdon, Research on Research Institute (RoRI) UCL

AI can now generate hypotheses faster than science can validate them. But validation capacity is finite, so someone must decide which AI-augmented ideas get research time, data and funding. That decision sits largely with research funders, whose allocation systems are already under strain.

In a recent Nature article, Geraint Rees & I reported that applications to twelve global funders rose by an average of 57% between 2022 and 2025. The 2026 Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowships received 21,627 proposals, three times the 2022 figure, and in the previous round roughly one in five proposals scored 95% or higher. Funders are responding with disclosure rules, demand management, interviews, lotteries and AI-assisted screening. Drawing on RoRI's work with a consortium of 25 funders, I will argue that these responses all try to salvage an application-led "push" model. The more promising frontier is "pull": funders using AI to seek out whom and what to fund, and to allocate validation capacity itself, while designing out the risks of Matthew effects, model monoculture and novelty collapse.

 

The future of peer review – A new vision on quality assurance of research outputs

Ludo Waltman, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University and RoRI

Peer review of research outputs is under extreme strain, further exacerbated by ongoing AI developments leading to an ever-increasing volume of research outputs. Bad actors are taking advantage of this situation, as shown by the alarming scale of research integrity problems in the scholarly publishing system.

Many proposals to improve peer review have been made. While these proposals may help to mitigate some of the most severe effects of the peer review crisis, they do not offer a solution to the deeper dynamics underlying this crisis. In this talk, I will present a new vision on the future of peer review developed in a recent RoRI report. In this vision, peer review will gradually be replaced by a new layered approach to quality assurance of research outputs, relying on a combination of three mechanisms: trust markers, peer engagement, and evidence synthesis.

As a practical step toward realizing this vision, I will discuss the publish-review-curate (PRC) model for scholarly publishing. This model is for instance used by the MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) platform. The model is getting increasingly popular, as demonstrated for instance by the newly established PRC Alliance. I will discuss concrete actions that researchers and their institutions can take to promote the adoption of the PRC model.

 

James Wilson is one of the founders of RoRI and has been its director since 2019. In his work, James has advanced concepts such as upstream public engagement, science diplomacy, responsible metrics and responsible research assessment; and he has co-founded or chaired initiatives such as People & Planet; the Campaign for Social Science; International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA); UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics; and the RoRI. In 2014, James was asked to chair an independent UK government review of research metrics, published as The Metric Tide. He subsequently chaired a European Commission expert group on Next Generation Metrics, and in 2022, revisited these debates with colleagues in Harnessing the Metric Tide.

Ludo Waltman is scientific director and professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. He is co-chair of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). Ludo’s work focuses on studying and developing infrastructures, algorithms, and tools to support research assessment, science policy, and scholarly communication. Ludo is open science ambassador of Leiden University, president of ASAPbio, and one of the initiators of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. Together with his colleague Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo has developed the well-known VOSviewer software for bibliometric visualization. Ludo serves as Editor-in-Chief of the MetaROR (MetaResearch Open Review) platform. Previously he was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Quantitative Science Studies.