Matti Vuorre

@matti.vuorre.com

2069 Followers 563 Following

I am an assistant professor at Tilburg University's Department of Social Psychology. I have a website at https://vuorre.com. All posts are posts.

Ragnar Frisch, econometrician and founding member of the Econometric Society. Wikipedia.

"From March 2026, moderators have added additional checks to ensure that authors have complied with all the terms of service for PsyArXiv. Moderators will also use authors’ past publication record to establish scholarly expertise for formats such as reviews, case studies, opinion pieces, etc. or topics where moderators have less experience, such as theories of consciousness, linguistics, philosophy, psychiatry, computational theory, etc. Such formats and topics require more specialist knowledge to establish whether they are in scope as scientific psychology, and what their scholarly contribution represents; hence, submissions cannot be evaluated by moderators in only a few minutes, and we rely on established scholarship to inform decisions. Submissions also need to be complete enough that they represent an independent contribution to the field of psychology, so slide decks and working papers presented as notes or research proposals or with incomplete methods will no longer be accepted into the archive, as they also require more than a few minutes to evaluate. We encourage authors to use OSF projects to record and version work-in-progress. However, PsyArXiv continues to accept stage 1 registered reports, where they pass standard checks for well-crafted registered reports. "

Screenshot of abstract:

Measurement is important for the scientific programmes of addictive behaviours. In the present study, we investigated the measurement of gaming disorder, which recently became the first formal mental disorder owing to technology use (International Classification of Diseases 11). In particular, we tested the gambling hypothesis: whether survey studies on gaming disorder are contaminated by a linguistic conflation of gambling and gaming behaviours. The 500 most cited studies were analysed. Both confirmatory and exploratory analyses supported the gambling hypothesis. Of all 13 studies for which authors shared their survey materials, only one had excluded gambling (95% credible interval (CrI) [1.8%, 33.9%]; Bayes factor (BF) compared to 50% prevalence = 45). Based on an exploratory review of 358 full texts, approximately 30% of the studies had excluded gambling (95% CrI [23.54%, 32.80%]; BF compared to 50% prevalence = 2.8 × 10¹4). We further surveyed English (EN; n = 312) and Slovak (SK; n = 319) speakers about their views on gaming and gambling, which revealed terminological confusions in both languages. For instance, about half of the participants (EN = 48.7%/SK = 59.1%) interpreted ‘gambling’ to be ‘gaming’ as well. The majority of gaming disorder survey research appears to be contaminated by a systematic measurement error stemming from conceptual confusion. This problem is linguistic and does not concern all languages similarly. To minimize the impact of the error, we recommend researchers clarify survey instructions and seek alternatives to survey data.

Graph of most common tags on psyarxiv
Tag ▾Uses
covid-19 1,529
mental health 1,118
depression 1,099
anxiety 839
emotion 820
meta-analysis 722
personality 699
individual differences 680
attention 659
memory 619
artificial intelligence 589

Abstract

Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year, which—if unchecked—will damage the scientific and economic progress of our societies. The result is editor and reviewer fatigue, irreproducible experiments, misguided experiments, disinformation and escalating costs that devour funding from taxpayers intended for research. It is high time to reevaluate current publishing models and outline a global plan to stop this unhealthy development. A conference was therefore organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to draft an action plan with specific recommendations, as follows. (i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). (ii) Adjust incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity, in a reputation economy where the gaming of publication numbers and citation metrics distorts the perception of academic excellence. (iii) Implement mechanisms to prevent and detect fake publications and fraud which are independent of publishers. (iv) Draft and implement legislations, regulations and policies to increase publishing quality and integrity. This is a call to action for universities, academies, science organizations and funders to unite and join this effort.

psyarxiv coauthorship network from https://vuorre.com/psyarxiv-dashboard/coauthorship showing Matti Vuorre's coauthors

Screenshot of https://powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com/

"Traumatized Mr. Incredible" meme with "Data and code available", "After looking at data & code"

An aerial photograph of the Tilburg University campus.

Neither does the role of an editor have to be tied to a commercial rent-seeker: The Publish, Review, Curate model of scholarly communication enables a given scholarly work to be included in a plurality of collections, perhaps analogous to journal volumes or blog categories, each curated by different editors on different platforms. Many editorial teams are already recognizing that things could indeed be better, and are resigning en masse to start free scholar-run journals.

These alternatives to ‘Big Academic Publishing‘ are already making it faster and cheaper to get one’s work permanently available and findable online, vetted by editors, and reviewed by peers.

Considering the estimated $8.97 billion dollars of (mostly) taxpayer money hoovered up in four years by only six commercial publishers on Open Access (OA) article processing fees, Elsevier’s $3,480 median hybrid OA processing fee, and an average turnaround time of 111 days, alternatives fare well: Peer Community In, an online platform for reviews and ‘recommendations’ (brief editorial reports), reports total costs of €369 per article. We’ve known these flawed economics for decades, yet the scientific literature remains in captivity. Maybe we just lack the sufficient anger for change.

Perhaps the time to replace academic journals is now. For me, it should have been 385 days ago.

Never mind that my colleagues are reading and citing the document on PsyArXiv. For this manuscript to count as a legitimate scientific product I must first endure inexplicable delays; arbitrary formatting requirements (the formatting manual costs $47.99); conflicts between my scholarly values and the astronomical profits that private publishing companies make from our taxpayer funded work; introduction of errors into my manuscript by the journal’s proofreaders; websites from hell; and of course peer review. Without that process of publication, my work will remain a ‘preprint’—an incomplete and unreliable artifact unworthy of a place in the scientific literature.

Could things be better? I surmise that, like fish unaware of their wet surrounds, academics don’t feel the pain because it’s all they’ve ever known.

For one, peer review has nothing to do with commercial journals or publishers—it’s the voluntary labor of our colleagues in service of scientific progress. We could, right now, be reviewing each others work on PREreview or Review Commons. Alas, instead of these scholarly debates we are complacent with pretending that a 40% profit margin industry is somehow facilitating the peer-review process better than the transparent platforms already available to us, for free.

Preprints—scholarly manuscripts not yet captured by the publication industry—are widely read and circulated, yet the ‘intellectual perestroika‘ they could facilitate hasn’t been uniformly realized because scholars continue to think of preprints as less authoritative than their industry-captured (‘published’) counterparts. It is time to free the scholarly literature from hostile captivity and embrace preprints as the primary objects of scholarly communication.

385 days ago, I submitted a manuscript for evaluation at an academic journal. Around the same time, I submitted the same manuscript to PsyArXiv, a document sharing website popular in the psychological sciences. The results: Radio silence for the journal submission; 334 downloads and 4 citations for the PsyArXiv version.

But this is a meaningless comparison: The PsyArXiv version hasn’t been peer-reviewed and listed on a journal’s website: It is not published, and everyone knows that publications are more valid than preprints, and that it is publications, not preprints, that provide the pitons on a scientist’s climb to success and fame.

1. Authors post their manuscript on a preprint server and then immediately submit to a Wiley journal. After each round of peer review they update the version of the preprint simultaneously with submitting their revised manuscript to the journal – a common practice in many fields. The latest version of the preprint is therefore identical to the
version that is under consideration by the journal. Where the article is eventually accepted by the journal, the final version of the preprint is materially identical to the accepted version of the manuscript.

2. An editor of a Wiley journal writes an editorial (or other un-reviewed piece such as a Comment) and posts it on a preprint server prior to submitting it to the journal. The article is immediately accepted without any changes, therefore the article published by the Wiley journal is identical to the preprinted version of the article.

3. Authors post their manuscript on a preprint server and submit to a Wiley journal where it undergoes in-depth peer review. The reviews are very positive, requiring only a single minor correction to fix a typographic error. The original preprint is therefore materially identical to the accepted and published version.

Network visualization of Matti Vuorre's PsyArXiv coauthorship network.

Screenshot from my email:

Dear Dr. Vuorre,

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Academia Immunity and Disease, a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal at the forefront of research in immunology, infectious diseases, and host-pathogen interactions. We are a part of Academia.edu platform.

Led by Editor-in-Chief - redacted this journal will provide a high-visibility platform for groundbreaking discoveries and critical insights in immunity and disease processes across biological systems.

Below you can find a link to the recently published editorial written by redacted which outlines the vision and objectives of Academia Immunity and Disease:
https://www.academia.edu/academia-immunity-and-disease/1/1/10.20935/AcadImmunoDis7853

We are currently accepting submissions for the inaugural issue, and we are pleased to invite you to contribute your work. To celebrate the launch, all accepted papers will receive a full waiver of publication fees.

Areas of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Fundamental and Translational Immunology
- Immunotechnology and Therapeutics
- Infectious Disease and Vaccinology
- Microbial Infection and Immune Evasion
- Microbial Pathogenesis
- Microbiome and Immune Modulation
- Systems and Computational Immunology

I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I'll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I'll provide no "value-added." My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece.

But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they'll need my seal of approval. I'll convince developers that, if a game isn't distributed by my company, then the game doesn't "count" -- indeed, barely even exists -- and all their labor on it has been in vain.

Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I'll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I'll tell the experts that it's their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free!

On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous -- a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not "rush to judgment" by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense?

I've got it: academics!

arxiv