Center ofTrial & Error.Journal ofTrial & Error.A Blog ofTrial & Error.

Many flagship journals reject most manuscripts at the desk-review stage, with rates of 40–80% being common

January 26, 2026

Stop Formatting Before the Desk Reject: A Proposal for Staged Submissions

In this piece, we call for more comparative research on field-specific replication dynamics.

December 07, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Field-specific Barriers to Performing Replications

News

November 05, 2025

Trial & Error Symposium 2025: Honesty, Openness, and Cultural Change

Once upon a time, when it was said that science self-corrects, the image was of a relatively unified culture, a body of practices guided by shared norms of disinterested inquiry.

October 05, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Self, Correction, and Science in Conflict-Laden Science

Scientific correction is often imagined as a clear-cut, procedural, and largely self-contained response to error

September 01, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Engines of Science Correction in the Biosciences - And How They Sometimes Run Out of Steam

Open notebook science challenges the traditional ways we produce and share knowledge, creating a more transparent and collaborative approach to research that could foster science correction

July 30, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: The Promise of Open Notebook Science

Subscribe to our
newsletter!

Keep up to date with the Blog, Center, and
Journal of Trial & Error

In August 2024, a peculiar letter to the editor titled “Practice of Neurosurgery on Saturn” was published in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.

June 29, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Hoaxes, Thought Experiments & Science Sleuths: Sniffing Out Ways to Correct the Scientific Record

Something is rotten in the state of science.

June 02, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Wissenschaftschmerz

In an age where trust in science, facts, and authority is rapidly eroding, art may offer a surprising way forward.

science

March 30, 2025

Breaking Bubbles: Art and Science in a Fractured World

Cultures of Trial and Error: Replication in Social Psychology (by Maarten Derksen)

March 25, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Replication in Social Psychology

A JOTE x NanoBubbles blog post series, with guest editors Melpomeni (Melina) Antonakaki, Candida F. Sánchez Burmester, Mady Barbeitas.

February 27, 2025

Cultures of Trial and Error: Identifying and Overcoming Barriers in Science Correction

Video: Professor Peter Bergeijk's On the inaccuracies of economic observations

News

January 30, 2025

Video: Professor Peter Bergeijk's 'On the inaccuracies of economic observations'

Do we truly want to focus so much on eradicating mistakes, and are we trying to train a generation of reliable ‘robots’?

October 29, 2024

Let’s Focus on Learning From Mistakes Not on Avoiding Mistakes

What were the views and ideals of JOTE's co-founders, and how did they differ from each other? In this post, we ask it Stefan Gaillard.

August 04, 2024

Founding JOTE: A Conversation with Stefan Gaillard: “I Believe That Positive Publication Bias is Actively Harming Science”

What were the views and ideals of JOTE's co-founders, and how did they differ from each other? In this post, we ask it Martijn van der Meer.

July 29, 2024

Founding JOTE: A Conversation with Martijn van der Meer. “My Interests Became More Political. I Wanted to Contribute to a Mission-Driven Model of Scientific Publishing”

What were the views and ideals of JOTE's co-founders, and how did they differ from each other? In this post, we ask it Max Bautista Perpinyà.

July 22, 2024

Founding JOTE: A Conversation with Max Bautista Perpinyà. “I Don’t Think Forbes Has Any Legitimacy in Acknowledging Scientific Success.”

We present to you the fourth instalment of our “JOTE in conversation” series, where we ask Leo Tiokhin about Red Team Market and his career.

April 01, 2024

JOTE in Conversation: Leo Tiokhin - “Criticism in Science Should be Rewarded”

We will welcome submissions for registered reports (RRs)! We see moves to publishing RRs as part of a broader, cultural move in academia towards more rigorous and transparent research.

News

March 17, 2024

JOTE Has a New Publishing Format: Registered Reports

Professor of rhetoric at Utrecht University Michael Burke talks about failure and academic publishing. "Why are publishing companies getting paid for our peer review?"

January 04, 2024

JOTE in Conversation: Michael Burke. "Why are publishing companies getting paid for our peer review?"

Yesterday, Stefan Gaillard (JOTE, DNUS), Megan Milota (UMCU, DNUS), Robert Dasović and Marcel Hobma organized a workshop on values in science, for the annual Dutch conference on Science Communication.

October 09, 2023

National Science Communication Day: JOTE Presents on Values in Science

Philosophers teach us that science is drenched in values, but what does this mean for science communication? Editor Marcel reflects on what values mean for his earlier work on clinical trials.

October 06, 2023

Sex Differences and Clinical Research: a Reflection on Communicating About Values in Science

Although the global switch from quantitative to qualitative evaluation measures is certainly necessary, without lowering academic competition they too might become game-able targets.

April 26, 2023

Evaluative Measures or Game-Able Targets? Academic Competition Can Turn Even Qualitative Measures into Targets for Researchers

In recent attempts to reform research assesment, metrics have explicitly become “incentives”. Yet, the Dutch debate about this transition focussed on the wrong elements.

February 27, 2023

How 'Recognition and Rewards' in Dutch Academia Turned Metrics into Incentives

More and more researchers pay processing costs for publishing in Open Access, but these costs disadvantage authors who are female, early in their career or, from low-income countries.

December 02, 2022

Not All That Shines Is Diamond: Why Open Access Publication Favors Rich Authors, Prestigious Universities and Industry-Funded Research

Science reformers suggest direct replications as a solution to the replication crisis, but they might not be able to deal with the conceptual and measurement issues that underlie the crisis.

October 28, 2022

Can Direct Replications Save Psychology From Its Conceptual and Measurement Issues?

Mistakes are quite common in music therapy, yet rarely discussed. The book Breaking Strings: Explorations of Mistakes in Music Therapy and this interview are an attempt to remedy that.

October 21, 2022

Music and Mistakes: An Interview with Two Music Therapists on When Things Go Wrong

We should beware of using Ariely and others as scapegoats. Rather than dwelling on the moral failings of individual researchers, we might reframe fraud and misconduct as a systemic problem.

September 10, 2021

Who Is to Blame When We Fly Too Close to the Sun – Academia or the Individual?

So if you ask, ‘who’s responsible?’ The truth is that everybody’s pointing but nobody is doing anything.

open science

May 31, 2020

JOTE in Conversation: Daniël Lakens. Whose Fault Is it That Science is Irreproducible? And Who the Heck Are Metascientists?

Psychological science is in a crisis, and has been for quite some time.

psychology

March 25, 2020

The Four Horsemen of the Crisis in Psychological Science

We talked with Léa Roumazeilles, PhD candidate in Neurobiology at Oxford University. We spoke with her about her thesis subject: ‘Structure and function of the social brain in primates’.

March 05, 2020

JOTE in Conversation: Léa Roumazeilles. How Does Failure Arise and How Do You Deal With It?

On February 6, the Open Science Community Utrecht (OSCU) organized a symposium on Open Science at the Faculty of Science of Utrecht University.

open science

February 21, 2020

Open Science Symposium Utrecht – Starting off with the Natural Sciences

Vorige week presenteerde minister Van Engelshoven haar langverwachte ‘Strategische Agenda voor het hoger onderwijs en onderzoek’.

open science

December 18, 2019

Wetenschap, Wees Eens Eerlijk Over Jezelf!

When I first heard the term “open science” and realized what it meant, I thought, well, that sounds good, how hard can it be?

October 18, 2019

The Open Science Summer School Experience

As fall hits, we now look back and reflect about the beginning of summer.

September 30, 2019

Are We Facing a Bigger Monster? The Journal of Trial and Error Visits Cambridge

What does a congress on Posthumanism have in common with our journal? To be very honest, I had no idea at first.

September 17, 2019

Posthumanism, Lille & "New Forms of Science"

On the 16th of June, project leader Martijn van der Meer gave a lecture at the Descartes Colloquium for the History and Philosophy of Sciences and Humanities at Utrecht University.

beginnings

September 06, 2019

Talk on Descartes Colloquium: Initiating a Journal for Trial and Error in Science

The how-to articles on setting up the infrastructure needed for a journal have been for us a rough sketch of a road that we have been traveling mostly, and proudly, off-road.

June 12, 2019

Becoming an Open Access Online Journal

One of our first alliances was with the Open Science Community Utrecht (OSCU). Stefan was already a member, so it was relatively easy for him to come into contact with the founders of OSCU.

June 03, 2019

Open Science Community Utrecht

We must admit that we were a little nervous for our first UtrechtInc meeting, exactly one week ago.

May 21, 2019

Our First UtrechtInc Meeting

A few months have passed since the Journal of Trial and Error’s first public appearance at the Descartes’ Christmas colloquium. Since then, we’ve had several exciting developments...

May 01, 2019

On How the JOTE Project Has Been Evolving

It truly was the most wonderful time of the year: the last Descartes Centre Colloquium of 2018. The Descartes Centre, of course, is a place of legend, it is right up there with El Dorado.

March 26, 2019

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Underlying our interest in establishing a humanistic science journal, was a need of constructing, not deconstructing, and by doing so, positively contributing to the intellectual scene...

beginnings

March 11, 2019

Humble Beginnings

An Open Science talk by Dr. Katja Mayer, who investigates practices of Open Science in computational Open Science and big data...

March 09, 2019

The Birth of a Journal

After a course in philosophy of science and a historiographical course on the history of the natural sciences, we had gotten a taste of what the rest of the program could be...

February 02, 2019

Open Science Talk