Conference format and timetable

Metascience 2025 will occur in London’s Knowledge Quarter, with a unique and rich mix of research, scientific, and cultural partners, facilities, and opportunities centered on a half-mile stretch of London’s Euston Road. The Research on Research Institute (RoRI), based at University College London (UCL), will be the lead local coordinating body for a collaborative effort by a consortium of London-based scientific and research institutions.

The conference will run for three days, featuring keynotes, talks, panels, and posters. Catering will be provided each day. Virtual pre-conference symposia, open to everyone, will take place online in the lead up to the conference from 16 to 27 June 2025.

Deadlines

The submission deadline was Friday 14 February 2025. We are delighted to have received over 500 submissions to our Call for Proposals – an incredible response which reflects the growth and dynamism of the global metascience community. We expect to announce selections in early April 2025.

Formats: Pre-conference virtual symposia, panels, talks & posters

This conference will consist of the following formats:

• Panels: The purpose of panel sessions is to foster debate and conversation among attendees. Panel sessions should not be dominated by long talks and lengthy slide presentations. They will involve 4-5 brief contributions (with or without slides) exploring different aspects of a given theme. Some panel sessions will be curated by the Program Committee, but this is an opportunity for proposers to curate a session on a topic or theme of interest.
• Pre-conference virtual symposia: This will consist of  60-90 minute virtual events on any topic related to metascience, to take place online in the two weeks (Monday 16th June – Friday 27th June 2025) leading up to the Metascience 2025 in-person meeting. A similar round of virtual symposia took place prior to Metascience 2023 and can be seen here. Virtual symposia may include, for example: a sequence of presentations; a moderated panel discussion; or a facilitated community discussion. All pre-conference virtual symposia will be free to attend through the Metascience website.
• Talks and Posters: Talks will be 10-15 minute presentations on any topic related to metascience, or new and emerging research findings. Posters will be displayed at the conference for a substantial portion of the meeting, with dedicated times during coffee and lunch breaks for participants to engage with poster authors and content.

Registration and Funding

Registration is necessary to attend the conference. All participants – panel convenors, authors, chairs, discussants, organisers, keynotes, plenary speakers, guests, volunteers, committee members and those without any specific role – MUST register in advance of the event. More information available on the registration page.

Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, are offering travel bursaries to early-career researchers and others who require assistance with travel and accommodation costs. Details about how to apply can be found on the funding page.

Online participation

The Pre-Conference Virtual Symposia will take place in the two weeks leading up to the conference (Monday 16th June – Friday 27th June 2025). Contributors must ensure that they have a strong enough connection to present online. If this is not the case, it is possible for contributors to send a recording to their convenors; this can also be done as “in case” the internet connection has problems on the day, or any other tech issues they may be having from home. The conference admins on metascience(at)nomadit.co.uk can also help organise a transfer. More detailed information on online access will be added to a dedicated page in due course.

The face-to-face conference on June 30 – July 2, 2025, will take place at University College London and will not have online participation.

Accessibility guidelines

Capacities for vision, hearing and sustained interaction in large crowds vary between people, and wax and wane for each of us from hour to hour and over the course of our lives. Conference participants are encouraged to follow these common accessibility guidelines, so as to make their presentation and other activities within the conference as accessible as possible.

Besides ensuring all colleagues are equally supported in their desire to participate, maximising the accessibility of presentations and discussions helps reach a wider academic audience.

Recognising the diversity of experiences, we accept that you may need to interpret/ignore these guidelines, in interest of your own health.

On-site accessibility, best practices for delegates, convenors and presenters – read more here.

Scam-aware

While our database is secure, a search for 90% of academic names (listed as convenors/authors) yields an active email address which can be spammed by scammers posing as conference accommodation support services, requesting payments/personal info (we do NOT use such providers); or sent spoof emails purporting to come from Council/Committee/Exec members requesting financial assistance. Please check the sender information carefully and the grammar of such requests, and if you do not recognise the email address as ours or the grammar is somewhat ‘off’, delete such emails. We cannot prevent receipt of these emails which do not come via our system.

How Proposals Will Be Evaluated

All proposals will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee which comprises 26 international metascience experts (listed on the Conference homepage). Each proposal will be scored by three reviewers according to a rubric based on the guidance given immediately above. The final decisions on selection and programming will be made in consultation with the full Program Committee with a view to maximising quality, interest and plurality of perspective. We aim to notify applicants of the Committee’s decision in early April.

Alongside the deliberations of the Program Committee, we aim to use the proposal submission process to do some interesting metascience! Without it affecting the selection process, we will evaluate the value of AI/ML tools to support peer review and selection, and the feasibility of the use of such tools in ways which respect applicant privacy (i.e. proposal text will not be shared with third-parties). A full report on this will be made available to Metascience 2025 attendees.

Metascience 2025 is working closely with the recently established MetaROR platform for open peer review of research articles in the field of metaresearch. We strongly encourage authors of research contributions presented at Metascience 2025 to consider submitting their work to MetaROR. This will enable your work to be evaluated in a fully transparent manner, offering a great way to put open science into practice!

Please send any questions to metascience(at)nomadit.co.uk.

Adding co-authors, co-convenors, chairs and discussants

If you did not specify colleagues when proposing the panel/paper, you can add them through the system. You can do this by clicking on the green ‘add convenor/author/discussant/chair’ button at the bottom of each list of participants and adding their name in the box that appears. Remember to click on the green ‘save’ on the right hand side, or the bottom of the page, in order to save your changes.

Participants will appear as ‘proposed’ and not be visible on the public programme until they create an account and accept their role via the email sent to them.

If you have difficulties with this, please email the conference administrators with names and email addresses and role they’ll play, and we will email them a request to add their details so we can add them to your content.

Logging in to look up the status of your proposal

We are hoping to have decisions on the content selection to proposers by early April 2025, but sometimes emails fail (or humans do), so you can check your panel acceptance status by logging into the system from the conference website (see the Log in link with the human head icon in the top right of your screen). Once logged in, click on the Logged in drop-down menu, select Conferences, select the conference from the drop down menu called ‘current’, and find the conference paper to check its status. If it says ‘pending’, the decision is yet to be made. If it says ‘accepted’ or ‘rejected,’ the outcome is final.

How to update your information

Log in and click Manage Account in the drop-down. It’s worth ensuring that your account displays the correct institutional affiliation – as this is displayed on the panel pages online and for f2f delegates, on the printed badge. It is preferable to have full institutional names, instead of abbreviations, however very long names won’t fit easily on the badge. This looks best under 40 characters and definitely shouldn’t exceed 80 characters! If you don’t have an institutional affiliation it is fine to leave it empty, or write something like ‘independent scholar’. You can also add both a short bio and an avatar.

How to share your panel page with others

Click on the panel header to expand the panel details and then click on the circular share icon  to find different options: email, Facebook, X, etc.

Timing of presentations

Each panel/workshop session slot will be 90 minutes long, accommodating a maximum of four presenters. Convenors should allot each presenter a maximum of 15 +5 mins for panels of four papers.

Editing your proposal

Paper authors, convenors, poster presenters and pre-conference symposia participants can use the login link in the toolbar above to edit their proposals.