From the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)

"Please contribute to a new, open-source collection of educational materials designed to strengthen learning for a democracy in question. We seek materials across disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and professional studies. 

"Democracy as a governing system thrives when it adheres to standards and practices such as truth, fairness, equity and equal opportunity, civic participation, checks and balances, nonviolent disagreement, and public deliberation. In a governing system of, by, and for the people, interpersonal norms are equally important, norms such as inclusion, compassion, decency, honesty, and shared responsibility for each other and our communities, the nation, and the world.

"Democracy needs to be taught and learned. These systems and norms are examples of the content we seek.

"If you have content to contribute, please fill out our description form. You do not need to upload materials at this time. Submit your description by January 18, 2026."

From the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), 11/12/25, by Mark Mather and Beth Jarosz

"In the past nine months, many public datasets have been altered or removed, thousands of statistical agency staff have retired or been laid off, and the accuracy of trusted federal statistics has been questioned and politicized.

"The strain on taxpayer-funded public data has been demoralizing—not just for the policymakers, researchers, businesses, and others who rely on federal statistics, but for the civil servants who protect them from misuse. The recent cancellation of a key survey measuring hunger in America was particularly alarming. But there’s one upside to this state of affairs: It’s mobilizing people who care about federal data to act.

"Federal data stakeholders have been working hard to safeguard data by archiving thousands of at-risk federal datasets, tracking changes to federal datasets, and documenting the value of federal data. PRB also launched a Federal Data Forum for people to share information about the latest threats to public data and how organizations and individuals can help. More than 600 concerned data users have joined the forum since May. ...

"Millions of people rely on federal statistics but few step up to defend them. So, how can data users give public data a voice? Here are five things you can do."

Read the complete blog post on the PRB website. Also, check out our DCSS "Resources for Tracking Trump Administration Actions," updated throughout 2025.

From the State Health Access Data Assistance Center, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota

"The Landscape of Major Federal Health Survey Data Releases in 2025" by 
Andrea Stewart, Research Fellow (November 13, 2025)

"A Brief Overview of Several Federal Health-Related Surveys" by 
SHADAC Staff and Colin Planalp, Associate Director for Emerging Health Policy Issues (November 10, 2025)

Interactive Survey Data Finder Tool

"The Higher Education Randomized Controlled Trial (THE-RCT) study aims to capitalize on existing data from postsecondary education RCTs to foster substantive and methodological scholarship and encourage teaching and learning opportunities. The cornerstone of THE-RCT is a restricted access file (RAF). This version contains individual-participant data from more than 30 of MDRC's higher education RCTs covering over 50 institutions and over 50,000 students. The data were originally collected as part of different randomized controlled trial evaluations of a variety of higher education interventions. The data were collected for different student samples, at different times, and in different locations for each study."

Distributed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2025-12-03. (https://doi.org/10.3886/E240388V3)

"The Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering (JWM) is launching a new article type: Research Interrupted — designed to spotlight meaningful and robust STEM education research that was prematurely terminated due to recent shifts in federal funding priorities. JWM recognizes the immense intellectual and emotional labor that you, as researchers, invest in these important projects, and we want to create a platform to elevate the insights from these projects so they can be shared, valued, and built upon.

Research Interrupted articles will be shorter in length than our traditional articles (under 4,000 words), with abbreviated literature reviews. Peer reviewers will receive guidance to calibrate the same quality standards for traditional JWM articles to the nature of the interrupted research. To reduce financial burden on authors, we have negotiated a reduced Gold Open Access APC with our publisher (from $1,500 to $750 for verified terminated projects). Green Open Access remains free of charge.

JWM recognizes it has been a difficult year for our communities, and we are here to support you. We are now accepting Letters of Intent to submit (LOI) through December 31, 2025. LOIs will indicate that authors plan to submit a full manuscript before December 2027. This is not a special issue; instead, Research Interrupted articles will be incorporated into future issues of the journal, following the same process as traditional JWM articles."

For more information, please see the full announcement

CALL FOR ARTICLES

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

ISSUE ON "Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study: 25th Anniversary"

"In celebration of the landmark Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study's 25th anniversary, we are soliciting proposals for an issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, situating the study in the larger literature, engaging with key questions using the most recent wave of survey data, inviting comparisons using other data sources, and identifying areas for future research. The issue will provide a lens into how today's heterogenous families form, grow, change, and thrive, using data within and across generations."

Prospective contributors should submit a CV and an abstract (up to two pages in length, single or double spaced) of their study along with up to three pages of supporting material (e.g., tables, figures, pictures, etc.) no later than 5 PM EST on January 7, 2026.

Read the complete call online.

From the Consortium of Social Science Associations series, "Why Social Science?"

Because Our Work Helps Us Envision and Build a Better Future

By Heather M. Washington, PhD (American Sociological Association)

"We live in an era of rapidly expanding economic inequality, humanitarian crises, chaotic deportation efforts, the militarization of U.S. cities, global conflicts and wars, burdensome labor practices that undermine work-life balance, and continued attempts to erode rights and protections of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ people. We also face ongoing environmental catastrophes, with additional consequential environmental challenges looming on the horizon. Social science provides a window to understand such issues and offers tools that can help us create more equitable policies to address these social problems. Every day, sociologists and other social scientists put research into action and ideas into impact in ways that help improve our collective future and build pathways toward more just outcomes. 

"Sociology is the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior. It offers a valuable lens through which contemporary social issues can be viewed, and by which historical connections can be evaluated. As a sociologist, I understand that equitable and just policies require collaboration among researchers, community members, and policymakers. Sociologists have the tools needed to study social phenomena. Community members provide real-world expertise and experience that is critical for understanding social issues. Policymakers wield the levers of change. Working together as researchers, community members, and policymakers is foundational to the discipline as evidenced by the influential and impactful work of pioneering sociologists. Sociologists working in and beyond the academy have continued this historical legacy, helping to create research-informed policies."

Read the full essay on the COSSA website

"NSF TIP's Workforce Development Roadmap [PDF] is an actionable agenda to guide future investments to strengthen the American workforce in critical and emerging technologies. As advances in critical and emerging technologies continue to rapidly expand and traditional industries adopt new technologies, the demand for a skilled or semi-skilled technical workforce is increasing across all economic sectors. Addressing the gap between the demand for, and the availability of, a labor force requires bold investment in workforce development that prepares individuals for higher-skill, higher-paying jobs that enhance economic mobility. The Workforce Development Roadmap lays out an investment framework to address this need through cross-sector collaborations and partnerships, innovative community-specific solutions, and expanded access to experiential learning and other training pathways."

NSF seeks input from individuals and organizations across all sectors on the Workforce Development Roadmap. Responses will be accepted until January 15, 2026, in the Workforce Development Roadmap form, by emailing TIPWorkforce@nsf.gov, or by mailing your response to the attention of Mary Crowe, 2415 Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22314, USA. 

"At a panel during the Coalition for Action in Higher Education’s April 2025 national protest, urban and cultural studies scholar Davarian Baldwin made a rousing call for courage in the face of political and material repression in US colleges and universities: “We are the power that we have been waiting for.” Responding to this call, the 2026 volume of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom seeks to showcase work of students, educators, and activists—and of unions, scholarly associations, and other governance bodies—in fighting back against repression. We invite original scholarly articles grounded in a renewed notion of academic freedom as not only an abstract value or principle to be defended but also a living practice—as historian Joan Scott, among others, has put it—of research, teaching, and public engagement that articulates a democratic higher education and a democratic society."

Submissions of 2,000–5,000 words (including any notes and references) are due by March 9, 2026. The complete call for papers, our editorial policy, submission guidelines and instructions, and links to past volumes of the journal are available on the journal's website. 

Westwood, Sean J. 2025. “The Potential Existential Threat of Large Language Models to Online Survey Research.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(47):e2518075122. doi:10.1073/pnas.2518075122. (Open access)

Abstract. The advancement of large language models poses a severe, potentially existential threat to online survey research, a fundamental tool for data collection across the sciences. This work demonstrates that the foundational assumption of survey research—that a coherent response is a human response—is no longer tenable. I designed and tested an autonomous synthetic respondent capable of producing survey data that possesses the coherence and plausibility of human responses. This agent successfully evades a comprehensive suite of data quality checks, including instruction-following tasks, logic puzzles, and “reverse shibboleth” questions designed to detect nonhuman actors, achieving a 99.8% pass rate on 6,000 trials of standard attention checks. The synthetic respondent generates internally consistent responses by maintaining a coherent demographic persona and a memory of its prior answers, producing plausible data on psychometric scales, vignette comprehension tasks, and complex socioeconomic trade-offs. Furthermore, its open-ended text responses are linguistically sophisticated and stylistically calibrated to the level of education of its assigned persona. Critically, the agent can be instructed to maliciously alter polling outcomes, demonstrating an overt vector for information warfare. More subtly, it can also infer a researcher’s latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them. These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure, rendering most current detection methods obsolete and posing a potential existential threat to unsupervised online research. The scientific community must urgently develop new data validation standards and reconsider its reliance on nonprobability, low-barrier online data collection methods.

Covered in "A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On" by Emanuel Maiberg. 404 Media (11/17/2025)

Sean Westwood is one of the founders of the Polarization Research Lab.