Senior writer at @chronicle.com, writing about scholarship, scholars, and society. stephanie.lee@chronicle.com / Signal: stephaniemlee.07 / stephaniemlee.com / San Francisco
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New study by @brendannyhan.bsky.social, @jasonreifler.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrates that prebunking election fraud rumors — by warning about anticipated false claims & filling conceptual gaps that those claims exploit — helps to reduce belief in falsehoods: www.science.org/content/arti...
Making Your Research Free May Cost You * With federal funding exceptionally unreliable, scientists say they are stressed about spending thousands of grant dollars on unexpected and questionable open-access charges. By @stephaniemlee.bsky.social for @chronicle.com www.chronicle.com/article/maki...
“CVS, the country’s largest pharmacy chain, is currently not offering Covid vaccines in 16 states…even to people who meet newly restricted criteria from the Food and Drug Administration.” The regulatory chaos has paralyzed vaccine access. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/w...
the publishers I write about in this story explicitly say they won't allow that
BREAKING: per email sent to agency staff NIH will _NOT_ reterminate the ~900 grants which were reinstated. "[W]e would strongly recommend against re-terminating such grants, because it will likely be viewed as a reapplication of the now-vacated Challenged Directives."
NEW: Don't ask too many questions, but... NIH may not re-terminate the 900ish grants at issue in the main NIH lawsuits after all. To the PIs of reinstated grants, SPEND NOW! 🧵 Here's what NIH is probably thinking. Bear with me:
I did not anticipate that publishers would respond to the new NIH policy by taking away subscription-model publishing as an option. Silly me
On one project, I have $3,000 in the budget for open access fees. Surprise!--that does not even pay for one article. At some journals, it doesn't even pay half. And for what? Authors write, and format for free. Reviewers work for free. Many editors are unpaid. Is the $ straight profit?
NEW: The NIH just started requiring NIH-funded research to be made freely, immediately available. In response, some journals are forcing scientists to pay thousands in open-access fees to publish. The result: chaos. The fees, one scholar says, are “out of control.” www.chronicle.com/article/maki...
In a year of highly unreliable federal funding, scientists say they're stressed about spending precious grant dollars on fees imposed by billion-dollar publishers like Springer Nature and Elsevier. “They’re responsible to shareholders, and not to the research community,” says an open-science expert.
NEW: The NIH just started requiring NIH-funded research to be made freely, immediately available. In response, some journals are forcing scientists to pay thousands in open-access fees to publish. The result: chaos. The fees, one scholar says, are “out of control.” www.chronicle.com/article/maki...
As a Black, Christian, former Democrat, Leo Terrell seemed an unlikely pick to head Trump's antisemitism task force that's waging war on "woke" and "Jew-hating" colleges. In other ways, he's right out of central casting, @peterelkind.bsky.social and I discovered www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
"She had two lines in the sand ... One was anything that was deemed illegal. And the second was anything that she felt flew in the face of science. And she says she was asked to do both of those.” www.statnews.com/2025/08/28/c...
Breaking news: Susan Monarez, the newly installed director of the CDC, is being ousted weeks after she was confirmed to lead the public health agency, according to multiple administration officials.
An M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return. It jibes with the emerging idea that generative A.I., “in its current incarnation, simply isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be,” johncassidysays.bsky.social writes.
NEW: He called Covid vaccines "the most failing medical product in the history of medical products." Now he's running a C.D.C. task force reviewing them. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/h...
2️⃣ SCOTUS is seemingly pushing *all* grant termination litigation to the Court of Federal Claims. This is expensive and time consuming, and some plaintiffs may give up. But if they don't, they may face even more political hackery. Trump has appointed 10 of the CFC's 16 active judges.
The whiplash is dizzying. “Just a few hours before the Supreme Court decision, I got an e-mail that I was able to resume spending,” one researcher tells @dangaristo.bsky.social and @maxkozlov.bsky.social. Now, the grant is likely to be cut again. “It’s heartbreaking.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, which allows hundreds of NIH grant terminations to proceed, @scott-delaney.bsky.social says: “I see no viable, no reasonably likely scenario where that research comes back. I think it’s gone.” www.chronicle.com/article/trac...
🙃🙃🙃
NEW @chronicle.com: I sat down with the chancellors of Vanderbilt and WashU to talk about how they believe #HigherEd should respond to Trumpism, and the pushback that stance has gotten from their peers. #AcademicSky
last week, I reported on a proposed NIH policy to ban researchers from collecting data about gender: www.chronicle.com/article/gend... @katherinejwu.com has an update: it's been "shot down by NIH leadership," a spokesperson says — but the timing/details are fuzzy www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...
BREAKING: Eric Adams Advisor Winnie Greco Handed a CITY Reporter Cash Stuffed in a Bag of Potato Chips www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/w...
Hey everybody! @drjuliawester.bsky.social and I have a new paper! We surveyed over 800 scientists, science communicators, and science educators who use social media. Conclusion: Scientists no longer find Twitter useful or pleasant, and many have switched to Bluesky! 🧪🌎🦑 doi.org/10.1093/icb/...
Join @stephaniemlee.bsky.social and I today at 1 p.m. ET as we guest-star on the @rseltzer.bsky.social and @brownepoints.bsky.social show and provide an update on the #HigherEd research landscape. @chronicle.com #AcademicSky connect.chronicle.com/trump-webina...
NEW: Hundreds of Jewish UCLA faculty have written to the UC Regents, saying that the Trump administration's $1 billion payment demand in the name of fighting antisemitism is "misguided and punitive." The letter brings together pro-Israel and anti-Zionist Jews: www.latimes.com/california/s...
!!! glad you're okay!
the latest from @franciediep.bsky.social and I www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
NIH FY26 #SCIMaP scorecards are now available for * All states * All districts The White House has shared its vision of priorities for this year and years to come. This vision comes with consequences for our health and innovation economy. Explore and share: scienceimpacts.org/fy26
When Trump signed an EO signaling more political oversight of research it didn’t set off new alarm bells inside the NIH They’d already been ringing for months @mmolteni.bsky.social @angusrohan.bsky.social & I document how politicization has slowed the agency down www.statnews.com/2025/08/15/i...
my moment has arrived
"It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual." Meta removed that language from its internal guidelines after I raised it. AI experts worry financial incentives will blur the line between human relationships and bot engagement. www.reuters.com/investigates...
New: NSF has reinstated the suspended UCLA grants, following yesterday's court order. Here's the email to Chancellor Frenk. (The ~490 NIH & 2 DOE grants remain suspended)
Really crazy, from the Most Transparent Administration in History™: The Department of Energy says it will throw out FOIA requests from as recently as less than a year ago unless the requester affirmatively emails them to say they still want the documents www.404media.co/trump-admini...
FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...
Gender Data Would Be Off-Limits Under Proposed NIH Policy. Story by @stephaniemlee.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/gend...
Eric Adams may be lagging in the polls—but he’s killing it on social media, Tyler Foggatt writes.
“Gender and sex are not interchangeable,” @britshmit.bsky.social says of the proposed NIH policy. “Failing to measure both means missing vital information, jeopardizing the accuracy and equity of our scientific findings.” www.chronicle.com/article/gend...
“If NIH restricts the collection of gender data, it will limit our ability to conduct rigorous, representative research,” said Brittany Charlton, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School… “Gender and sex are not interchangeable. Failing to measure both means missing vital information”
SCOOP: The NIH is moving to prohibit funded scientists, inside and outside the agency, from collecting data about gender, according to a draft policy I obtained. It’s part of the NIH’s aggressive crackdown on gender-identity research. www.chronicle.com/article/gend...
BREAKING: A San Francisco-based judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore hundreds of science research grants to UCLA, more than a third of the $584 million in funds the government has cut: www.latimes.com/california/s...
Under the proposed NIH policy, data on sex could still be gathered — provided that the used definitions of sex reflect the Trump administration’s view that there are only two sexes, female and male, and they are determined at birth and unchangeable. www.chronicle.com/article/gend...
SCOOP: The NIH is moving to prohibit funded scientists, inside and outside the agency, from collecting data about gender, according to a draft policy I obtained. It’s part of the NIH’s aggressive crackdown on gender-identity research. www.chronicle.com/article/gend...
I got to pick the brains of some of the sharpest investigative science/health/enviro journalists around and learned a ton. Thanks @laurenweberhp.bsky.social @naveenasadasivam.bsky.social @primateyell.bsky.social @dangaristo.bsky.social @susien.bsky.social! www.theopennotebook.com/2025/08/12/h...
For @theopennotebook.bsky.social, I wrote about what to do when people don't call you back. To investigate secretive subjects, reporters can make creative use of public documents: lawsuits, corporate filings, government databases, social media, and much more. www.theopennotebook.com/2025/08/12/h...
Given recent reports that ChatGPT handles 2.5bn requests a day, the total consumption of GPT-5 could reach the daily electricity demand of 1.5m US homes. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
BREAKING: Vinay Prasad is returning to the FDA to resume his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy, and blood product regulation — just two weeks after his ouster. www.statnews.com/2025/08/09/v...
“GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.
A federal judge in California wants NSF to explain why its decision to freeze 300 grants to scientists at UCLA isn’t a violation of her earlier ruling in another case that such blanket grant terminations are probably illegal. scim.ag/4fnlgei
Nations are largely ignoring a growing source of greenhouse gases in their climate commitments & risk assessments: emissions driven by climate change itself, like methane released from warming wetlands. A new research collaboration aims to address that gap in our understanding:
NEW: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a new lawsuit this morning challenging Marco Rubio's authority to launch deportations based on protected speech. It's the first to directly argue that using that FP authority wrt pro-Palestinian student activists was unconstitutional.
Funding for this groundbreaking research on Alzheimer's was terminated by the Trump Administration www.bostonglobe.com/2025/08/06/m...
"Its political leadership has shredded the NIH playbook so thoroughly, current and former NIH officials told me, that even at current funding levels they are unable to perform their core work of vetting and powering some of the best research around the world." www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...
We've been waiting for this report from NSF for many months — results of a survey on sexual harassment at US Antarctic stations. The numbers aren't good, but at least this problem is out in the open & starting to be tackled. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
The Manhattan Institute and the Heterodox Academy disagree on whether higher ed can reform itself www.chronicle.com/article/they...
#Breaking: Health secretary RFK Jr. shuts door on U.S. investment in mRNA vaccine research www.statnews.com/2025/08/05/m...
Inside Trump’s New Tactic to Separate Immigrant Families www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/u...
If Harvard and Columbia are the clear losers under the Trump administration, Grand Canyon is a clear winner. On a campus that celebrated in the streets when Trump won, the change in administrations has meant a seismic shift in how the college is viewed in D.C. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
BREAKING: Watchdog government agency finds the NIH and the Trump administration have illegally withheld funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, and rips into HHS for failing to justify its slow-walking of funds. www.gao.gov/products/b-3...
Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community. reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...
Dire-wolf drama continues to unfold. A scientist who has been critical of the company behind some audacious de-extinction claims believes that it has been trying to undermine the credibility of its critics ahead of major announcements. The company denies involvement. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
New: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it is shutting down cpb.org/pressroom/Co...
Breaking: Trump says he ordered the firing of Erika McEntarfer, accusing the labor statistics commissioner of manipulating jobs data.
"After years of publishers not routinely—or even often—naming sleuths despite many asking for their often unpaid and risky work to be acknowledged, the trend of acknowledging who identified issues in papers may be gaining momentum." @retractionwatch.com reports: retractionwatch.com/2025/07/30/n...
great story guys!
NEW: Massive and confusing inconsistencies at NIH. New director says health disparities research is critical yet grants are being cut left and right. With @aniloza.bsky.social and @ericboodman.bsky.social. (Also my last story for STAT. 😢) www.statnews.com/2025/08/01/n...
When George Mason's president came under attack by the Trump administration, he did what few embattled presidents dared; he spoke out and defended his actions. On Friday, he may learn whether publicly challenging the government's narrative helped or hurt him. www.chronicle.com/article/greg...
It is very, very hard to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars when you can't be sure if your budget will be $200,000 or $0 24 hours from now.
Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."
The NIH budget will INCREASE by $400 million — not slashed by 40%, as Trump proposed — according to a proposal by Senate appropriators, says Sen Murray. "Some have asked if there will even be an NIH by [2029]. The commmittee's resounding message is yes—Congress has your back", she says.
"I hear this word 'pivot' coming from researchers: I'm going to pivot my research, I'm going to write a grant and focus on LGB and take out the T…That alarms me…we can't bend the knee to this administration…we, as scientists, have an ethical obligation and duty to fight back." 💯
"Brown University reached a deal with the Trump administration on Wednesday that does not involve paying the government hundreds of millions of dollars, as Columbia University agreed to do last week." www.chronicle.com/article/brow...
Deeply reported story by @stephaniemlee.bsky.social, on the impact of grant terminations — even for those who have managed to get their awards reinstated “I do not trust 100 percent,” one researcher said, “that there won’t be another termination.”
hi! would you mind DMing me so we can chat? Stephanie.lee@chronicle.com or stephaniemlee.07 on signal
NEW: Their NIH grants are back, but nothing is back to normal. In June, a judge ordered the restoration of 900+ terminated grants. So how's that going? Scientists say they're happy, but also it's been a bumpy road—and they're afraid their funds will get cut again. www.chronicle.com/article/thei...
Over and over, scientists worried that the instability would harm their ability to train the next generation. “When you don’t have steady state funding, people can’t plan for the future,” one told me. “If people can’t plan for a future, then no one has a future.” www.chronicle.com/article/thei...
Challenges of picking up where you left off: —Grant restorations worth $0. —Reinstatements requiring compliance with Trump's anti-trans executive order. —Deciding between the ambitious experiment and the scaled-down version that can be done before $ runs out again. www.chronicle.com/article/thei...
NEW: Their NIH grants are back, but nothing is back to normal. In June, a judge ordered the restoration of 900+ terminated grants. So how's that going? Scientists say they're happy, but also it's been a bumpy road—and they're afraid their funds will get cut again. www.chronicle.com/article/thei...
EXCLUSIVE: Brown University has reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore the university’s federal research funding and address allegations that it failed to do enough to stop the harassment of Jewish students. @bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/30/m...
Top drug regulator George Tidmarsh will serve as acting head of biologics after Vinay Prasad's ouster www.statnews.com/2025/07/30/g...
Update: A Trump administration effort to block all funding that flows to outside health researchers was scrapped Tuesday evening after senior White House officials intervened www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
#Breaking: Vinay Prasad, a top official at the Food and Drug Administration, has suddenly departed after a series of controversial decisions about a treatment for boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. www.statnews.com/2025/07/29/v...
The White House has put new limits on NIH awards to scientists, potentially restricting billions in grants www.wsj.com/politics/pol... New with @lizessleywhyte.bsky.social and Ken Thomas
Lonni Besançon faced online abuse, threats and legal challenges in response to his research integrity sleuthing during the COVID-19 pandemic go.nature.com/4m5DN0X
NEW investigation: DOGE-Pilled The full story on the transformation of 23 year-old Luke Farritor and how he ended up at the Department of Government Efficiency--slashing, dismantling, undoing--wielding a résumé that "didn’t pass muster” NO PAYWALL! www.bloomberg.com/features/202...
EXCLUSIVE: A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted test of a cloud-making machine. But behind the scenes, they were planning a larger and potentially riskier study of tech that could dim the sun's rays, internal documents show. www.politico.com/news/2025/07...
Federal funding in limbo? Try GoFundMe instead. That's the route several scholars have taken in recent months — but the notion of crowdfunding academic research is a double-edged sword. I've got the story @chronicle.com. #HigherEd #AcademicSky
POLITICO compiled a list of all the Washington Post staffers who have left in the past eight months. It’s at least a hundred names, many of them among the biggest names in journalism. This is the fastest erosion of a major outlet ever.
A while ago, we started a #FixItFriday tradition. We keep a running list - large & small, digital & analog, anything broken or annoying - and work on it together. Today's 30-second fix: to remove AI "preview" from search results, here's the setting for Chrome users: www.reddit.com/r/techsuppor...
Was it worth it? No matter how the costs are measured, faculty said that Columbia didn’t have much of a choice. “We’re more or less negotiating the terms of our own mugging,” said @karl-jacoby.bsky.social. By Sarah Huddleston, @theoscheer.bsky.social, Camila Gomez: www.chronicle.com/article/colu...
Science finally retracts the Arsenic life paper www.science.org/content/arti...
Breaking news: Columbia University has reached an extraordinary deal with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay $200 million to resolve the government's claims of antisemitism on the campus. chroni.cl/4mgRHO1
This article is as clear and coherent about what is happening at Virginia institutions of higher education as anything I have read. It has nothing to do with antisemitism or civil rights; it is a coordinated and hostile political takeover.
A new working paper examines how three controversies — racial bias in the criminal justice system, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are taught, by looking at whether canonical works are assigned alongside their critics. chroni.cl/4kUVUFV
Breaking News: The Trump administration opened an investigation into Harvard’s use of international visas, despite ongoing talks to end their monthslong battle.
Scientists overwhelmingly recognize the value of sharing null results, but rarely publish them in the research literature go.nature.com/450KElr
“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers.