Travis J. Wiltshire
LightNews LightNews
banner
tjwiltshire.bsky.social
Travis J. Wiltshire
@tjwiltshire.bsky.social
53 followers 180 following 6 posts
Assosciate Professor of Cognitive Science at Tilburg University. PI in Collective Cognition and Complex Systems Lab. Musician in When Waves Collapse.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Travis J. Wiltshire
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
tjwiltshire.bsky.social
🎉 New Paper 🎉

Congrats to Jingwen Yang on her first published paper as part of the #tools4teams project. We conducted a systematic review showing the existing effects of biofeedback on various team states, processes, and performance.
October 20, 2025 at 9:03 AM
tjwiltshire.bsky.social
🚨new preprint🚨
Paper on bursty communication dynamics in multidisciplinary health care teams with M. Janssens, S. C. P. van der Bruggen, and L. Beetroot that will be presented next Thursday (July 17) at the 2025 Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research Conference in Rotterdam.
psyarxivbot.bsky.social PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Jul 11
Exploring the Underlying Communicative Temporal Structure of Multidisciplinary Healthcare Team Meetings: https://osf.io/3rsx7
July 11, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Travis J. Wiltshire
arekbialek.bsky.social
🚨 New preprint + open pipeline 🚨
CVML-based behavioral observations: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Co-led with @wimpouw.bsky.social, alongside @jamestrujillo.bsky.social, @babajideowoyele.bsky.social, @tjwiltshire.bsky.social, F. Hasselman, N. Siekiera, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi.
👀 Take a look & use it!
June 23, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Travis J. Wiltshire
dsquintana.bsky.social
Papers are one-way conversations. Getting additional info from authors can be hard, so clear reporting from the outset is critical.

In our new preprint, we (@annalschubert.bsky.social, Meike Steinhilber & @heeminkang.bsky.social) propose a set of psych reporting guidelines osf.io/preprints/ps...
Further resources on the interpretation of null results. A dataset was generated showing simulated data points in two groups A and B. Group A follows a normal distribution with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 1, while Group B exhibits a bimodal distribution, characterized by peaks at 9 and 11 with a standard deviation of 0.5. As shown in the figure (A), barplots often fail to capture the true distribution of the data. Although boxplots in (B) provide more insights into the data distribution compared to barplots, violin plots in (C) and raincloud plots in (D) provide a more accurate representation of the actual data distribution. Reproducible code to generate this figure is available at https://osf.io/mk5qa/. Table 4. Overview of effect sizes for popular statistical models, with descriptions and software tools for estimation
May 28, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Travis J. Wiltshire
psyarxivbot.bsky.social
Biofeedback in Team Settings: A Systematic Review of Applications and Outcomes: https://osf.io/awmb4
April 4, 2025 at 1:41 PM
tjwiltshire.bsky.social
First post here on Bluesky. In a recent paper, we show that higher team synchronization of player position in the virtual environment (in certain movement dimensions) , negatively predicts performance in a professional e-sports competition (Dota 2) across consecutive years.
November 22, 2024 at 12:55 PM