SORTEE

ECR Asks: Dr Joel Pick

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The tenth in the blog series ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview experienced researchers for advice.

ECR Asks: Professor Angela Moles

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The ninth in the blog series ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview experienced researchers for advice.

SORTEE Code Club Debrief: February - April 2026

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The authors’ debriefs about the recent few SORTEE Code Club meetings

ECR Asks: Professor Timothy Clark

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The eighth in the blog series ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview experienced researchers for advice.

Upcoming SORTEE conference

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2026: Registration is now open!

Virtual & world-wide! 13-14 October 2026

The 2026 SORTEE conference will run continuously from 13th October 07:00 UTC to 14th October 10:00 UTC to cover all time zones.

Conference registration is now OPEN.

➡️ Register here

The conference is FREE for SORTEE members, so please consider joining SORTEE. There is a free joining option, no questions asked.

Content submissions are now closed and are currently being evaluated.

ECR Asks: Dr Cecilia Baldoni

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The seventh in the blog series ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview experienced researchers for advice.

My experience starting the SORTEE Brazil chapter

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are back with the highlights from the SORTEE 2025 conference! This time we offer you an overview and useful information of the sessions at the SORTEE 2025 conference: plenary talks, opening and closing remarks, introductions to open science and workshops.

ECR Asks: Professor Alex Holcombe

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The sixth in the blog series ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview experienced researchers for advice.

Join Local Chapters

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Canada Chapter

As part of SORTEE’s efforts to grow a community-driven, grass-roots movement, we are launching a Canada Chapter. This chapter will focus on fostering discussion and collaboration around open, reliable, and transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology research at a local scale by connecting Canada-based SORTEE members.

The Canada Chapter will potentially include virtual and in-person activities, support training and discussion on open science practices, and help create opportunities for local events that complement SORTEE’s goals. In the longer term, we aim to explore small-scale funding to support in-person meetups, workshops and other events across Canada.

Reflections from the SORTEE 2025 Leadership Retreat

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Discover the highlights from the SORTEE 2025 Leadership Retreat! This blog post covers key outcomes from three days of inspiring discussions on SORTEE’s vision, sustainability, and governance. Explore the priorities taking shape for 2026, our plans to strengthen visibility and collaboration within the EcoEvo community, and a snapshot of the retreat in numbers.

Strengthening Open Science Across Disciplines: Highlights from the First SORTEE–SIPS Leadership Meeting

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A report back from the joint meeting between SORTEE and SIPS (Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science).

Discover the Sessions of the SORTEE 2025 Conference (2) 🔍

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are back one last time with the highlights from the SORTEE 2025 conference! Here you will find an overview of hackathons and unconferences at the SORTEE 2025 conference and other related useful information.

Discover the Sessions of the SORTEE 2025 Conference (1) 🔍

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Code Club: Introduction to data simulation and power analysis

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debriefs about the latest SORTEE Code Club, all about data simulation and power analysis!

Highlights from the SORTEE 2025 Conference ✨

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Catch up on the highlights from the SORTEE 2025 conference! We will explore what exactly happened, get to see the attendance statistics and fun facts, and discover how successful the conference was in the eyes of the attendees, as well as some behind-the-scenes facts from the conference committee. Stay tuned for more posts from the conference committee!

ECR Asks: Professor Steven Cooke

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fifth in the blog series called ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview SORTEE members for advice.

SORTEE Code Club Unconference: How to start your own code club

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debriefs about the 2025 SORTEE Conference, and the Unconference Session 5: How to start your own code club

ECR Asks: Dr. Ed Ivimey-Cook

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The fourth in the new blog series called ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview SORTEE members for advice.

SORTEE Code Club debrief: Version control: a researcher's guide to Git and Github

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debrief about the latest code club meeting, about version control using Git and Github!

ECR Asks: Dr. Brooke Long-Fox

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The third in the new blog series called ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview SORTEE members for advice.

SORTEE Code Club debrief: Getting started with Shiny: build interactive applications in R

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debrief about the latest code club meeting, in which Ed Ivimey-Cook talked about Shiny applications!

ECR Asks: Dr. Malgorzata Lagisz

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The second in the new blog series called ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview SORTEE members for advice.

SORTEE Code Club debrief: From notebook to paper

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debrief about the latest code club meeting, on how to use Quarto and RStudio to write a paper!

ECR Asks: Professor Tim Parker

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE kicks off a new blog series called ECR Asks, where early career researchers interview SORTEE members for advice.

SORTEE Code Club debrief: Introduction to Reproducible Coding Environments

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debrief about the latest code club meeting, all about reproducible science in R!

Adventures in using open-source georeferenced genetic data for large-scale biogeography

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors discuss the challenges and insights from using open-source georeferenced genetic data for large-scale biogeography.

SORTEE Code Club debrief: Decode the Code

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors debrief about the latest code club meeting, all to do with improving messy code!

SORTEE Code Club debrief: Kick-off meeting 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors discuss the code club kick-off meeting for 2025!

Journal Club: On open science, error correction and the imperfect scientist

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The authors discuss the potential for data and coding error correction during pre-submission and the actions that can be taken to embrace this potential.

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club Hackathon ‘Creating a Code Standard’

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Publishing our code and data is an important Open, Reliable, and Transparent practice to ensure the reproducibility of research. To facilitate the production and reviewing of code, Arthur Rodrigues and Natalie van Dis hosted the Code Club meetings of October and November with a Hackathon aimed at Creating a Code Standard.

Journal Club: A step-by-step guide to making sense of complex models using data simulations

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The authors provide a step-by-step guide to make sense of complex models using data simulations and discuss their recent paper.

Journal Club: Towards a more reproducible trait-based ecology

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The authors talk about their paper - A protocol for reproducible functional diversity analyses

Position Statements

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Local Open Science Meet-ups - Tuesday September 17

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Code Club returned from midyear break with a training session on local Open Science meet-ups. Kaija Gahm shared her experiences with running weekly “Hacky Hours” in her department at the University of California, Los Angeles, which serves as a collaborative coding and working space. We discussed the value of such local Open Science meet-ups and how to organize them.

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Workshop “Code your own website” - Tuesday June 18

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In June’s Code Club session, Steffi LaZerte hosted a workshop on how to code our own website. By walking participants through the code underlying her own website, she showed us how to use Markdown and Quarto to create and host a website on GitHub.

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Hacky Hour Code Review Exercise - Tuesday May 21

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In May’s Hacky Hour, we did a code review exercise using the 17-step checklist for Ecology and Evolution. Participants reviewed each other’s code or that of already published papers and discussed what would constitute the “perfect” piece of Open, Reliable and Transparent (ORT) code.

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Code Review Checklist for Ecology and Evolution - Tuesday April 16

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this month’s Training Session, Stefan Vriend, Freddy Hillemann and Joey Burant hosted a workshop on how to code review a manuscript, using a checklist they developed for Ecology and Evolution.

Debunking myths around open data

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Scientific research has led to multiple advancements and methodological innovations. However, modern scientists function under constant time pressure to produce a high number of publications and statistically significant results, thus sometimes they resort to questionable research practices. In a survey that examined how widespread these practices are in the field of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the majority of participants admitted to having implemented a questionable practice in the past. 64% of the respondents had selected only the statistically significant results of an analysis (cherry picking) in at least one publication. 42% collected additional data after checking the significance of the data (p-hacking) and 51% admitted to presenting an unexpected result as their initial hypothesis (HARKing).

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Hacky Hour - Tuesday March 19

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Member Engagement Committee runs Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance on SORTEE’s Slack.

In this month’s Hacky Hour, 9 participants shared their code mistakes, starting up the SORTEE library of code mistakes! The goal is twofold: the normalization of coding errors and building a resource of (common) code mistakes that you can use during code review.

Debrief of SORTEE Code Club: Kickoff Meeting - Tuesday February 20

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Member Engagement Committee is breathing new life into the peer code review club: we will run Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance.

With 13 participants, we kicked off the first Code Club of 2024, learning how code review can make coding a more collaborative process in the scientific research cycle.

Modern Palaeoanthropology advances towards greater openness and accessibility

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian and solicitor, along with Arthur Smith Woodward, the Curator of Geology at the Natural History Museum of London, proclaimed the discovery of the ‘missing link’ bridging the gap between apes and humans. They claimed to have found a fragment of a skull resembling that of a human in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England. Additionally, they uncovered mandible fragments that were posited to belong to the same individual. Smith Woodward reconstructed the skull fragments, and collectively, they theorized that the discovery provided evidence of a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago. They unveiled their findings at a Geological Society meeting in 1912 (1), which were generally accepted by the scientific community. The fossil was named “Piltdown man,” creating a new species: Eoanthropus dawsoni. Unfortunately, the story does not end here.

Setting the record straight: how data and code transparency caught an error and how I fixed it

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“We were unable to reproduce your results, and I think the reason is that there is a bug in how you are calculating your correlation coefficients.”

That was part of an email I got this summer that absolutely crushed me. It doesn’t take much empathy to feel that knot in your stomach and existential dread from imposter syndrome, especially if you are currently a graduate student, post-doc, or another early-career researcher. What happens when you or someone else catches an error post-publication is not something most scientists know, certainly none of my peers or advisors did, but I got to experience the process from a supportive group of colleagues, advisors, and journal editors. I’m not writing this piece to commiserate on the fears, anxieties, and setbacks we have as scientists, nor am I going to belabor the details of the analysis or the justifications/explanations of how I missed the error; I’m writing this because the larger picture of the scientific process, when aided by data transparency, works to make our collective knowledge better.

PeerJ Award Winners at SORTEE 2023

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The third annual SORTEE conference was held virtually in October 2023, continuously over 24 hours to cover all time zones. There were 266 registered participants from 36 countries. The conference programme included plenary talks, 5 workshops, 5 hackathons and 8 unconference sessions. During the closing sessions two winners were announced for the SORTEE “Student Award” and “Researcher Award”. These awards have been renamed and redesigned to increase transparency, equity and inclusions. In the new award process, nominations were initially assessed for eligibility, then eligible candidates were entered as finalists into a lottery to select the winner for each award. The lottery was run using a random ‘spin the wheel’ program, requiring one re-spin to ensure fulfilment of SORTEE Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy. The winner of the ‘Student Award’ was: Euan Young affiliated with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The winner of the ‘Researcher Award’ was Birgit Szabo affiliated with the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Complexities of reuse and synthesis in the open data landscape

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Open data offers immense opportunities for ecologists and evolutionary biologists. The more good quality data are available, the more questions can be answered—and at broader spatial and temporal scales and at greater taxonomic generality. However, making use of open data is far from straightforward.

At this year’s SORTEE conference, Rose Trappes and Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar co-organized a productive unconference to tackle this complex topic. For that, they invited three experienced panellists: Matt Grainger, Antica Culina and Benno Simmons, and held a discussion about the opportunities and challenges of data reuse and data synthesis in the fast-moving world of open data. We heard from researchers experienced in reusing and synthesising data, as well as those active in creating open data resources for ecologists and evolutionary biologists.

SORTEE member voices – Félicie Dhellemmes

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Félicie Dhellemmes (she/her)

Date: 28 June 2023.

Position: Post-Doc.

Research and/or work interests:
Behavioral ecology, movement ecology, individual differences in behavior, foraging.

How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in ORT research practices pretty early on when it became evident to me that if we wanted the public to trust science (in the context of climate, for example), science had to be exemplary and as trustworthy as possible.

SORTEE member voices – Saeed Shafiei Sabet

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Saeed Shafiei Sabet

Date: 8 December 2022.

Position: Research Fellow.

Research and/or work interests:
Animal behavior, Anthropogenic noise, predator-prey interactions,
noise impacts, wildlife, anti-predator behavior, fish, crustaceans.

How did you become interested in open research?
To be able to share our findings and behavioral observations in a more
clear and available way.

What is an open/reliable/transparent science practice that you admire but have not yet adopted in your own work?
Data availability and access.

SORTEE member voices – Malgorzata (Losia) Lagisz

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Malgorzata (Losia) Lagisz

Date: 30 June 2023.

Position: Research Fellow.

Research and/or work interests:
I am a biologist with research experience and skills in different fields of science. I often venture outside biological topics and data, for example, into biomedical, environmental, conservation, or even social sciences. In my research, I use research synthesis methods, such as systematic reviews/maps and meta-analyses.

SORTEE member voices – Gabe Winter

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Gabe Winter (they/any)

Date: 2 June 2023.

Position: PhD candidate at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany.

Research and/or work interests:
I am an ecologist, currently working with intra-individual variability in behaviour, but also super excited about open, transparent and reproducible research and data science.

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Having well documented R scripts have improved a lot my own reproducibility. Before, when I had to pause my analysis for a couple months (during field/lab work season, for example), it used to be tricky to remember what I was doing, and I usually had to start everything from the beginning. Now, using commented R markdowns I can simply continue from where I stopped every time. It takes some time to comment everything, but that same time (and more) is saved when I don’t have to re-analyse from scratch.

SORTEE member voices – Erlend B. Nilsen

Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Erlend B. Nilsen.

Date: 9 July 2021.

Position: Senior researcher / Professor.

Research and/or work interests:
I’m an applied quantitative ecologist, working mainly with bird and mammal populations. I’m particularly interested in human impacts (such as climate change, harvest, and land use patterns) on these species’ populations, including distribution, abundance demography, and life history traits. To address these challenges, we statistical analyses of empirical dat and simulation of studies. Lately, I have also been involved in research in disease ecology. In addition, I have a strong interest in how we manage hard-won ecological data to the best of the research community and society at large.

SORTEE translations

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

English
Español (Spanish)
Français (French)
Português (Portuguese)
Hrvatski (Croatian)
中国人 (Chinese)
عربي (Arabic)
日本 (Japanese)
Polski (Polish)
Русский (Russian)
हिंदी (Hindi)
বাংলা (Bengali)
اردو (Urdu)
bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Deutsch (German)

English

SORTEE - Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology

SORTEE is a service organisation which brings together researchers working to improve reliability and transparency through cultural and institutional changes in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields broadly defined. Anyone interested in improving research in these disciplines is welcome to join, regardless of experience. The society is international in scope, membership, and objectives.
The SORTEE website is in English, but you can use a translation tool to read it. For example, https://translate.google.com

EcoEvoRxiv is expanding beyond English-language manuscripts

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

By Dan Noble and Tim Parker
English editing by Rachael Blake
Translations by Elvira D’Bastiani (Portuguese) and Pablo Recio-Santiago (Spanish)

English

Researchers around the world use scientific publications to share the knowledge and insights about global biodiversity, ecology, and evolutionary biology gained from their research. Unfortunately, many scientists face obstacles to sharing the knowledge that they generate because they can’t write scientific papers in English. There is now a growing body of research in non-English speaking countries which provide important data on global biodiversity that is relevant for conservation and management practices (Chowdhury et al. 2022). Such data is also essential for filling major research gaps globally that can be critical for evidence synthesis (Amano et al. 2023; White et al. 2022; Zenni et al. 2023).

SORTEE two-year anniversary: our members’ voices

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Between June and September 2021, we started the #SORTEEvoices blog series by asking inaugural members to choose a few questions to answer from a list of 30 options (15 questions about open science, reproducibility, and transparency; 15 miscellaneous questions)¹. Responses from sixty-four inaugural members were posted on our blog every week until October 2022. To celebrate SORTEE’s 2-year anniversary in December 2022, we’d like to look back and summarise our members’ voices.

SORTEE member voices – Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar.

Date: 06 September 2021.

Position: Principal Investigator.

Research and/or work interests: I’m an evolutionary ecologist with a soft spot for birds and a great interest in evidence synthesis, meta-research and open science.

How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in open research during my PhD and mostly as the result of multiple failed replication attempts of a textbook example in behavioural ecology, the badge of status or signalling status hypothesis in house sparrows. During my PhD I was also surrounded by a few persistent colleagues that would not stop talking about low reproducibility, low replicability, reduced data and code openness, etc… so it was relatively straightforward for me to become more and more interested in these topics, and to feel more and more the need for changes in the way we do science.

SORTEE member voices – Owen Petchey

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Owen Petchey.

Date: 19 July 2021.

Research and/or work interests: Ecological responses to environmental change.

How did you become interested in open research?
Some years ago I was particularly interested in a published research report that included the data. I wanted to know more about how the quantitative analyses were done. So I downloaded the data, and set about reproducing the analyses. From that grew further interest, and then a class during which I and the participants worked on several similar reproductions. We learned a lot about how to prepare research reports and data so that they could be readily reproduced (and what not to do!). Some of the reports are published here: http://opetchey.github.io/RREEBES/

SORTEE member voices – David Wilkinson

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: David Wilkinson.

Date: 18 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Research and/or work interests: Joint species distribution modelling; occupancy modelling; computational reproducibility; version control; code/data sharing practices.

How did you become interested in open research?
It wasn’t really the “open research” concept directly that first interested me, but as a primarily methods-based quantitative ecologist it was code and data sharing that made my PhD research possible, and from there I got into other practices.

SORTEE member voices – William Gearty

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: William Gearty.

Date: 13 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Research and/or work interests: The degree to which species diversify taxonomically and functionally varies dramatically across time, space, and the tree of life. This ultimately has resulted in the vast diversity and disparity that we see on Earth today. Numerous physiological, ecological, and environmental conditions have been implicated as the causes for this variation. I integrate tools and theory from paleontology, geology, ecology, and physiology to study how these components collectively drive and constrain diversity and disparity across time, space, and life. Beyond understanding how and why life diversified the way it did in the past, my research provides insights into how modern anthropogenic environmental shifts may ultimately influence the ecology and evolution of today’s biosphere.

SORTEE member voices – Nicholas Grebe

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Nicholas Grebe.

Date: 13 July 2021.

Research and/or work interests: Behavioral ecology and endocrinology; evolution of social behavior.

How did you become interested in open research?
I come from a psychology background, and it was during graduate school that questions and controversy surrounding reproducibility became a full-blown ‘crisis’. I remember two things clearly about that time. First, the disorienting feeling of not knowing which findings in my field, many of which were considered ’textbook’ examples, were actually robust and trustworthy. And second, the energy and effort of a small group of reformers to change the way we produced and evaluated scientific findings. I really identified with this perspective – being critical-minded but not cynical – and so I’ve tried to do my small part to grow open science: first in psychology, and now in behavioral ecology.

SORTEE member voices – Tina Heger

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Tina Heger.

Date: 12 July 2021.

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
Discoverability. The more data and information are openly available, the harder it might become to find the things you are looking for. We need better methods for finding not only data and datasets, but also information of other kinds (theoretical knowledge, results of reviews, meta-analyses, conceptual frameworks etc). Smart ways of producing knowledge graphs on demand could be a solution.

SORTEE member voices – Signe White

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Signe White.

Date: 12 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: My postdoctoral current work focuses on the beneficial effects of microbiomes of marine diatoms on adaptation to increasing ocean temperatures. My former work in graduate school was on how parasites evolved in response to host genetic heterogeneity. I’m also interested in biogeography and coevolution..

SORTEE member voices - Szymon Drobniak

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Szymon Drobniak.

Date: 11 July 2021.

Position: Lecturer.

Research and/or work interests: Evolution and biostatistics.

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
Less reliability on classical null hypothesis testing.

Tell us about one of your hobbies.
I collect chemical elements.

Where to find you online?:
Szymekdrobniak.WordPress.com

SORTEE member voices – Victoria Hemming

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Victoria Hemming.

Date: 10 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Research and/or work interests: Conservation; Ecology; Decision Science; Risk Analysis.

If you could recommend one paper to the community of ecologists and evolutionary biologists on an openness / reliability / transparency topic, what paper would you choose?
I would recommend the paper by Fraser et al. 2018 “Questionable Research Practices in Ecology and Evolution”. It gives a really great overview of the concepts related to Openness, Reproducibility and Transparency in Ecological domains and an indication of the extent to which the practices were upheld (or not).

SORTEE member voices – Daniel Hoops

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Daniel Hoops.

Date: 10 July 2021.

Position: Postdoc.

Research and/or work interests: Evolution; Neuroscience.

What is an open / reliable / transparent science practice that you admire but have not yet adopted in your own work?
Publishing my code (at all) and my data (in a way that is easy to understand and use). This is so much work, and that work has to be done after you have finished the project. By that point I am just so tired of it and want to move on to new and exciting things. There are few incentives for me to keep working on a project that is already submittable, and numerous incentives for me to move on to a new project and get it to the point where it can be submitted.

SORTEE member voices – Marko Bracic

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Marko Bračić.

Date: 10 July 2021.

Position: PhD student.

Research and/or work interests: Behavioural biology, decision-making, individual differences, cognition, evolution, nature conservation, better science.

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Sharing data and code; version control.

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
Version control.

SORTEE member voices – Lauren White

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Dr Lauren C White.

Date: 10 July 2021.

Position: Post-doctoral researcher.

Research and/or work interests: My work primarily uses genetic data gathered from wild animal populations to address fundamental questions on how natural selection shapes life and practical questions of how we can conserve it. My most recent project focuses on chimpanzee kinship dynamics and uses genomic data to estimate pairwise relatedness across an entire community of wild chimpanzees. This dataset allows me to examine age-specific changes in local relatedness in chimpanzees, which has implications for the evolution of menopause and inbreeding avoidance. I also work closely with conservation practitioners to answer questions that guide management of threatened species. This work has ranged from improving the genetic fingerprinting methods used to monitor population size of the northern hairy-nosed wombat, to assessing genetic diversity to guide gene-swaps and reintroductions of numerous species such as the greater stick-nest rat. Finally, my research also frequently involves methods development, as I often make use of sub-optimal genetic samples (ancient DNA, museum specimens, feces, hair and feathers), which are usually easier and more ethical to collect, but which require unique analytical treatments.

SORTEE member voices – Alkistis Elliott-Graves

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Alkistis Elliott-Graves.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Junior Professor in Philosophy of Science, Bielefeld University.

Research and/or work interests: Philosophy of Ecology, Philosophical issues in Meta-Analysis.

How did you become interested in open research?
By engaging with the philosophical implications of Meta-Analysis. Especially the differences between Meta-Analysis as it is used in Medicine and as it is used in Biology.

SORTEE member voices – Timothy Clark

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Timothy Clark.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Associate Professor.

Research and/or work interests: Eco-physiology of aquatic animals in response to environmental change.

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
Misconduct (e.g., data fabrication) is more widespread than scientists like to accept, and the situation will not improve unless we start openly discussing it, and we give protection/incentives for whistleblowers to come forward if they have robust evidence behind their allegations.

SORTEE member voices – Ana Benítez López

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Ana Benítez López.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Postdoc researcher (Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación Fellow).

Research and/or work interests: I am an ecologist with broad interests in spatial ecology, macroecology, biodiversity conservation and global change biology. I am interested in the factors that determine species distributions and species abundance, with an emphasis on the effect of anthropogenic drivers and how these may drive local populations or species to extinction. My main scientific achievements include incorporating complex meta-analytical and predictive models to study the effect of global change drivers on species abundance patterns across large scales. This approach involves using text-mining techniques to compile large datasets from the literature, and the coupling of georeferenced data with spatial information on anthropogenic drivers and species life-history traits.

SORTEE member voices – Matt Lloyd Jones

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Matt Lloyd Jones.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate.

Research and/or work interests: Systematic review and meta-analysis in microbial invasion ecology.

How did you become interested in open research?
Through meeting like-minded folk.

What’s an open science practice or topic that you’ve changed your views on within the last few years? Why?
HARKing; it’s essentially taught as a skill in a lot of PhDs, and I only realised it was an issue when meeting open-science folk.

SORTEE member voices – Verena Brauer

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Verena Brauer.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Senior Scientist.

Research and/or work interests: Microbial Ecology.

How did you become interested in open research?
It is extremely difficult to perform diligent, profound research in Ecology nowadays because of the high pressure to publish a lot and fast. The research system selects for sensational and superficial research. That should not be.

SORTEE member voices – Juan Rocha

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Juan Rocha.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: I’m a research scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. My research questions are oriented towards understanding critical transitions: from regime shifts in ecological systems, to collective action in society. Currently I’m focusing on the idea of cascading effects: how a critical transition in an ecosystem in the world can impact the likelihood of other ecosystems tipping over. I develop mathematical models to explore which interconnections are plausible, and look for empirical signatures of cascading effects on trade networks and rainfall transport dynamics. I’m interested in methods for identifying resilience surrogates – good observables that can tell you how resilient a system is – as well as misperception of feedbacks and their consequences. I find inspiration in complex systems science, and the use of mathematical models, networks and other computational methods to understand social and ecological complexity.

SORTEE member voices – Tanya Strydom

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Tanya Strydom.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Graduate Student.

How did you become interested in open research?
At a graduate-level (field) course. This was the first time that I was really introduced to the bigger issue of open research and (by extension) reproducibility, and I decided then and there it was time to Stan… I think this was in part because someone was there to hold my hand through the ‘scary unknown’ of what reproducibility looks like (and how to work towards it), which probably says something about the importance of integrating openness and reproducibility into student training.

SORTEE member voices – Ineta Kačergytė

Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Ineta Kačergytė.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: doctoral student.

Research and/or work interests: I am working within conservation biology and landscape ecology fields, where I am evaluating restoration and creation initiatives to facilitate biodiversity. I mainly work with bird communities, but also involve amphibians and fish..

How did you become interested in open research?
It is an increasingly relevant topic. We have been exposed to the difficulties, dangers, and ethics of current research transparency from the early career stage. I think my colleagues, structured courses, open discussion during conferences and other platforms, as well as relevant publications made me interested in this topic.

SORTEE member voices – Gideon Deme Gywa

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Gideon Deme Gywa.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: PhD candidate.

Research and/or work interests: I’m a PhD scholar at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and hosted at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. My research over the years has focused on using theoretical models, experimental and field approaches to answer questions in evolutionary ecology, conservation of biodiversity in the ecosystem, and plastic waste management across the African continent. Overall, I am passionate about environmental protection and biodiversity conservation. Currently, I’m the project leader for the AFRICAN ECO-RESEARCH (AFRICER) project.

SORTEE member voices – Angelica Beltran

Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Angelica Beltran.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Widlife Tech.

Research and/or work interests: Behavior; connectivity .

How did you become interested in open research?
Once I graduated from my Bachelor of Science, I lost the access to research material that my university provided, and found the wall of many folks outside of academia regarding accessibility and prices.

SORTEE member voices – Joseph Burant

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Joseph Burant.

Date: 09 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral researcher with CIEE Living Data Project.

Research and/or work interests: Research topics include population dynamics, animal behaviour, conservation, migration, and data science. In particular, I’m interested in how populations respond to environmental change and whether we can detect impending population declines before they occur..

What is an open / reliable / transparent science practice that you admire but have not yet adopted in your own work?
A fully transparent and reproducible pipeline, from pre-registration to final manuscript publication and data archiving.

SORTEE member voices – Antje Girndt

Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Antje Girndt.

Date: 08 July 2021.

Position: Former postdoc.

Research and/or work interests: biology & education.

Tell us about a paper that influenced your thinking on an issue of open / reliable / transparent research.
Smaldino and McElreath 2016: The natural selection of bad science https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160384

What was your most embarrassing coding moment?
Lots and lots of ugly plots.

SORTEE member voices – Bárbara Freitas

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Bárbara Freitas.

Date: 07 July 2021.

Position: PhD Student.

Research and/or work interests: Evolutionary biology; Speciation; Bioacoustics.

What’s an open science practice or topic that you’ve changed your views on within the last few years? Why?
Providing the package version that was used in each step of our work. My colleagues and I were trying to apply the methodology described in an article to our own data, and we were wasting too much time trying to find the correct version of each package that had been used. So I realized the importance of providing not only the version of the main software used, but also the package version numbers.

SORTEE member voices – David Nash

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: David Nash.

Date: 07 July 2021.

Position: Associate Professor (Lektor).

Research and/or work interests: Coevolution, Mutualism, Social parasitism, Entomology, Social insects, Butterflies, Conservation, biodiversity assessment.

How did you become interested in open research?
Through general philosophy of science.

Do you have a favorite non-human organism? What is it and why is it your favorite?
The Aardvark, for many reasons - It was the first illustration in the illustrated dictionary that I grew up with, and the more I learnt about aardvarks, the more fascinated I became.

SORTEE member voices – César González-Lagos

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: César González-Lagos.

Date: 07 July 2021.

Position: Academic.

Research and/or work interests: Behavioral Ecology, Global Change.

What strategies/approaches do you think are most likely to lead to a research culture change?
Incentives from funding agencies, work places but also recognition from the research community.

Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Santiago, raised in La Unión south of Chile.

SORTEE member voices – Bawan Amin

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Bawan Amin.

Date: 07 July 2021.

Position: PhD-candidate.

Research and/or work interests: Animal behaviour and ecology, mainly focusing on patterns at the individual level.

How did you become interested in open research?
It was about the time of my second masters thesis (2016-2017) when I started to see that academia worked differently from what I would have expected. Academia seemed to be focused on impact factors, quantity and political choices, rather than the pursuit of knowledge for humanity, making it fundamentally different from what science is supposed to be. That’s where my interest in changing academia started. I now believe that opening up is a key step into changing back from academia to science.

SORTEE member voices – Vivienne Foroughirad

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Vivienne Foroughirad.

Date: 06 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Fellow.

Research and/or work interests: I’m a behavioral ecologist interested specifically in research reproducibility and transparency over the course of long-term studies.

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I would like to see more incentives for collaboration between early-career researchers. Co-authorships are often undervalued due to lack of or limited adherence to clear authorship guidelines, which in turn decreases the incentives to share data and work collaboratively with others, or to provide in-depth oversight on projects. Some career stages, like dissertation research, specifically discourage or prohibit in-depth collaboration, even though significant amounts of all research are conducted by graduate students as they are one of the cheapest sources of labor.

SORTEE member voices – Ellen Bledsoe

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Ellen Bledsoe.

Date: 06 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow.

Research and/or work interests: Community ecology, long-term community dynamics, data science, open science, DEI in STEM.

How did you become interested in open research?
I ended up in a wonderful PhD lab that is very strongly committed to Open Science. Before joining, I had honestly not spent much time thinking about the subject, and this aspect of the lab had little impact on my decision to join. I’m so glad, however, that I ended up in a group that helped me learn the importance of openness, reproducibility, and transparency in science!

SORTEE member voices – Maxime Fraser Franco

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Maxime Fraser Franco.

Date: 06 July 2021.

Position: PhD Student.

Research and/or work interests: My main research interest is on predator-prey interactions. I focus on studying the ecological and proximal mechanisms that shape the coexistence of foraging specialists and generalists within predator populations. More precisely, I evaluate how individual differences in predator foraging specialization defines individual differences in the type of prey they capture. These dynamics can be shaped by prey behaviour, habitat structure, and predator experience.

Testing ecological hypotheses of individual behavioural variation in wild populations of free-ranging predators can impose considerable ethical, logistical, and financial challenges. Thus, to circumvent some of these difficulties, a part of my work is done using online multiplayer video games as my study system. Virtual worlds contain structured environments where complex trophic and social interactions occur. Some video game types, such as asymmetrical multiplayer horror games, can realistically reproduce a predator-prey interaction within multiple types of habitats. For instance, in these games, players vary in the strategies they use to succeed, while managing navigation and interactions within the virtual environment. Thus, although video games come with their own biases (as any study system) and are a simplified representation of reality, I believe they can provide valuable ecological insight for ecologists.

SORTEE member voices – Esteban Fernandez-Juricic

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Esteban Fernandez-Juricic.

Date: 06 July 2021.

Position: Professor of Biological Sciences.

Research and/or work interests: visual ecology, animal behavior, conservation ecology.

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
Editorial decisions should be based on the robustness of the experimental design and quality of data instead of the type of result (positive, negative)?

SORTEE member voices – Matt Grainger

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Matt Grainger.

Date: 05 July 2021.

Position: Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: I am an applied ecologist interested in how we use knowledge to better inform decision making in species conservation. I have a strong interest in developing tools that help people gather information in robust and transparent ways, interact with that information and make inference from it. I currently work on several projects that are fundamentally about how we make open research approaches (i.e. sharing data, sharing code, sharing best practice) as an integrated part of the workflow for biodiversity researchers and how we can take this open research and use it to help decision-makers find optimal solutions..

SORTEE member voices – Patrice Pottier

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Patrice Pottier.

Date: 05 July 2021.

Position: PhD Candidate.

Research and/or work interests: My research mostly revolves around understanding the variation in animals’ responses to anthropogenic stressors. I am also interested in animal behaviour, life history and evolution more broadly and I try to make science more open and reproducible..

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
I recently decided to preregister the majority of my research projects. Although it seemed intimidating at first, I found preregistration to be a useful step to critically assess the relevance of my research projects. It made me rethink my hypotheses and predictions and made sure my experimental design was suitable to answer my original questions. The analysis and writing part was also very straightforward as I just had to follow my plans!

SORTEE member voices – Hannah Fraser

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Hannah Fraser.

Date: 04 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: Ecology metascience. Bringing metascience insights from other disciplines to ecology.

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
If I could change one thing about current research practices I would like to see the incentive to publish research quickly removed so that people could conduct more careful, nuanced research.

SORTEE member voices – Wendy Thorogood

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Wendy Thorogood.

Date: 04 July 2021.

Position: MSc Student.

Research and/or work interests: Currently studying giraffe social networks.

How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in ORT when reading and critically reviewing articles for journal clubs as part of my Masters studies. Some papers were so uninstructive that the possibility of reproduction or even of grasping what was done was entirely missing.

SORTEE member voices – Kimberley Mathot

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Kimberley Mathot.

Date: 04 July 2021.

Position: Assistant Professor.

Research and/or work interests: Behavioural ecology, foraging, energetics, multi-level variation.

What institutional policies do you see as most important to change to improve the reliability of science? (‘institution’ broadly defined including funders, journals, universities, etc.)
There should be mandatory archiving of all data and scripts necessary to reproduce the results in a study, with checks in place to ensure that it actually happens. Unfortunately, as it currently stands, this is often not done even when mandated, or it is done, but the “archived” data and scripts are so poorly described or incomplete that they lack utility.

SORTEE member voices – Peter Mikula

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Peter Mikula.

Date: 04 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: Macroecology, behavioural ecology, birdsong, geography of fear, conservation culturomics.

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Whenever possible, I publish raw data along with my papers. In ecological studies, it is still a common practice not to publish raw data or to publish transformed data which often can not be used for different research questions. I found it frustrating. But rather than wait for the others, I have changed my own approach.

SORTEE member voices – Paul Robinson

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Paul Robinson.

Date: 03 July 2021.

Position: Conservation Manager, Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Sierra Leone.

Research and/or work interests: Bird and mammal population assessment through a mix of field methods (passive acoustic monitors, camera trap and more traditional site sampling) and analytical methods for imperfect detection (occupancy and spatial capture recapture) implemented in R.

How did you become interested in open research?
Being unable to reproduce results from scientific papers.

SORTEE member voices – Andrew Kadykalo

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Andrew Kadykalo.

Date: 03 July 2021.

Position: PhD candidate.

Research and/or work interests: Andrew Kadykalo is a PhD Candidate in the department of Department of Biology and Institute of Environmental and Interdisciplinary Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is also a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation and Environmental Management (CEBCEM). He is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist who applies natural and social science tools, including policy-relevant systematic evidence syntheses, interviews, and cognitive mapping to explore relationships between people and nature. His research interests focus on predicting the delivery of regulating ecosystem services (e.g. pollination, flood regulation), and the use of evidence in wildlife management and biodiversity conservation. He is a Research Impact Canada (RIC) engaged scholar, A Community on Ecosystem Services (ACES) fellow, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) fellow in wildlife management, and is engaged in Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) functions as an early career researcher..

SORTEE member voices – Benjamin Marshall

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Benjamin Michael Marshall.

Date: 03 July 2021.

Position: Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: Animal movement and spatial ecology.

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I would like to see less emphasis placed on novelty. I see great value in undertaking the same research as others independently, be that a deliberate repetition or in isolation. Examining differences/similarities between research efforts can not only show interesting variation in the study subject, but also in the way researchers conceptualise and tackle a question. I’d love to see a greater appreciation for the value of repeated non-novel work and how it can build towards a more confident consensus. Deprioritizing novelty could relieve fears of being scooped and the rush to publish; relaxing time and publication pressure in science is sorely needed. There is little sense in building something up if the foundations are not solid.

SORTEE member voices – Rob Knell

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Rob Knell.

Date: 03 July 2021.

Position: Reader at Queen Mary University of London.

Research and/or work interests: Evolutionary ecology, more specifically how mating systems influence adaptation, extinction and population dynamics. Animal contests and the evolution of weaponry. Disease ecology on occasion. Statistics.

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Recording data analysis as an rmarkdown document rather than just a script. This allows a much more extensive record to be kept along with the output from the analysis as well as the code, and is much easier to understand when you come back to an analysis some time after it was done. You can then publish the rmarkdown file along with a paper, either as an appendix or a supplementary file or with the data file in a repository like Dryad. This way the code and the full output of the analysis is open and available. Everyone benefits: we benefit because our records are as good as they can be, and anyone interested in our publication benefits because the full analysis is available.

SORTEE member voices – Jason Pither

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Jason Pither.

Date: 03 July 2021.

Position: Associate Professor.

Research and/or work interests: Ecology.

What institutional policies do you see as most important to change to improve the reliability of science? (‘institution’ broadly defined including funders, journals, universities, etc.)
Universities need to change promotion and tenure assessment policies to explicitly value ORT. A few universities have implemented such changes, but this needs to become standard worldwide. Early career researchers need to know from the start that their ORT efforts are valued.

SORTEE member voices – Bo Johannesson

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Bo Johannesson.

Date: 03 July 2021.

Position: Principal Research Engineer.

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
I would change the practice of collecting lots of data before good planning.

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
The importance of using observational experiments and manipulative experiments together to build research programs that are both focused and adaptive is undervalued. Researchers should also be clear about how limited the firm conclusions are from those investigations we refer to.

SORTEE member voices – Alexander Mielke

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Alexander Mielke.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: Primatology; Social Relationships; Cooperation.

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
I think we need to move from storing data in article-specific repositories (such as Dryad or Github) and towards a platform-system where raw datasets are publicly available. Access to data is a limiting factor for getting involved in ecological research, and currently raw data are still largely unavailable. Field Sites and labs should have standardised data-storage protocols, and there should be databases where labs working on similar topics can publish their data in a comparable format, removing barriers and allowing for comparable analyses.

SORTEE member voices – Fredrik Jutfelt

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Fredrik Jutfelt.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Professor.

Research and/or work interests: Animal physiology and behaviour, thermal biology.

How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in open research after realising scientific misconduct and data fabrication occurs in my field. That started me, together with a group of friends, on a path to investigate papers with suspicious results. When looking for raw data from published papers I found that most authors don’t share their data even when the journals mandate it. This clearly needs to change and I think SORTEE is a great starting point.

SORTEE member voices – Susi Zajitschek

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Susi Zajitschek.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Lecturer.

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in behavioural ecology and teaching.

How did you become interested in open research?
Scientific integrity is often taken for granted, and while for the vast majority of researchers there is no question about this, there are the occasional cases of misconduct, shady/patchy reporting or non-reproducibility. In the past, this may have happened “accidentally”, with no means of violating best practise, but just based on lack of awareness. I am really happy that in the last few years so much effort has gone into ORT, this is really the way forward for science!

SORTEE member voices – Malika Ihle

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Malika Ihle.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Reproducible Research Oxford coordinator.

Research and/or work interests: I’m a former behavioral ecologist who worked on mate choice and extra-pair behavior. I am now promoting open research across disciplines at the University of Oxford by providing training, building communities, and liaising with stakeholders to inform the design of incentives and policies. I am also acting as the local network lead of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN).

SORTEE member voices – Rishika Dubla

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Rishika Dubla.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Research and/or work interests: I’m an evolutionary biologist, with an interest in sexual selection and conflict, and social behaviours in reptiles. Overall, I’m interested in the different interactions between the sexes and how that can lead to novel adaptations which exhibit plasticity and eventually drive the evolution of a species to adopt unique social systems. I’m particularly interested in these patterns in reptiles as often they’re considered ‘behaviourally inferior’ to mammals, though in fact they are very socially complex animals but receive limited attention. I’m also interested in scientific illustrations and dabble in a bit of sci art too! .

SORTEE member voices – Dieter Lukas

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Dieter Lukas.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Group Leader.

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in why we can find different social behaviour in different populations?

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I think we want to reconsider what counts as research output. Currently, the focus is on authorship on manuscripts, but researchers also share data, code, mentorship etc. We currently do not have a good system to acknowledge these additional shared outputs that are often critical in ORT research practices.

SORTEE member voices – Markus Eichhorn

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Markus Eichhorn.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Lecturer.

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in forest ecology.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?
In ecology there are a number of groups who control access to large global databases which, while ostensibly available to all, are often closed, in that access is determined by gatekeepers who determine who can use the data, the uses to which it is put, and the credit that derives from their use. Often the gatekeepers play only a limited role in obtaining the data itself, relying instead on networks of contributors whose work is inadequately recognised. Even more problematic is that these databases are held by researchers based in Global North countries, even while they extract data from the Global South. This is not merely a problem for open data but is an example of colonial practices in modern science.

SORTEE member voices – Hannah Dugdale

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Hannah Dugdale.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Professor of Evolutionary Medicine.

Research and/or work interests: My group is interested in the evolution of within- and between-individual differences in behavioural and life-history traits. Our current focus is the evolution of senescence. Individuals clearly senesce differently, but our understanding of how and why individuals senesce in such different ways remains limited. Our research takes a comprehensive and integrative approach to investigate why individual variation in senescence evolved and is maintained. This will generate vital knowledge on how individuals can live longer, healthier lives.

SORTEE member voices – Marcus Michelangeli

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Marcus Michelangeli.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: I am a behavioural ecologist interested in animal movement, collective behaviour and how wildlife is responding to anthropogenic pollution. The primary aim of my research is to understand how and when behavioural responses of individuals or groups to environmental change, can lead to broader ecological consequences, and long-term evolutionary shifts, across multiple levels of biology and species. I attempt to study these questions within real-world contexts, where animals face a myriad of environmental challenges that can have both simultaneous and cumulative effects on their performance and survival. To do this, I try to apply a wide-range of data collection methods, from controlled laboratory studies, to semi-natural mesocosm experiments, to remote-sensing tracking of animals in the wild. More recently, I have put more time and focus on improving and developing methods to make my research more transparent and reproducible, including improvement in my analytical sophistication.

SORTEE member voices – Christine Meynard

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Christine Meynard.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Chargé de recherche.

Research and/or work interests: I am a macro-ecologist and biogeographer, interested in the relationships between biodiversity and environmental gradients at large scales, and their links to global change.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?
I think most scientists agree that we need results from science to be open access, but the question of how to solve this issue in practice in a fair way for everyone is a real conundrum. This includes both publications generated through research, as well as making the data used in those publications freely and readily available. There are tensions between researchers who have more or less funding within the same countries, but also between the Global South and the Global North, interests are not the same, neither are resources.

SORTEE member voices – Miguel Camacho

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Miguel Camacho.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral researcher.

Research and/or work interests: I hold a PhD in conservation genetics and evolutionary biology. I am interested in using genetics and ecology to understand the origins of biodiversity and how to preserve it. I worked with mammals from Borneo and amphibians from the Iberian Peninsula. I am enthusiastic about data science and reproducible research. At the moment I am working on applied agriculture at IFAPA, Sevilla: metabarcoding of soil microbiome.

SORTEE member voices – Alec Christie

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Alec Christie.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Cambridge.

Research and/or work interests: I’m interested in how we can provide decision-makers with relevant and reliable scientific evidence to inform their decision-making. I’m also interested in developing decision support tools that help decision-makers combine and assess different sources of evidence (e.g., local knowledge, grey literature, peer-reviewed literature, evidence syntheses) in conservation..

SORTEE member voices – Vijayan Jithin

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Vijayan Jithin.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Masters Student.

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in ecology, evolution and media. Currently my work focuses on habitat ecology, behavioral adaptations, and education.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?:
I think one of the greatest challenges facing the ORT science movement is lack of awareness. In addition, most people not from well-funded institutions, or highly developed countries, lack funding for publication in open-access journals and funding to meet archival policies of journals. To do better science, we need the existing knowledge to be openly available, which is not in the case for many. Academic societies and institutions should adopt ORT science policies which will enhance the overall quality of ‘doing’ science!

The Replication Crisis is not a crisis for researchers - it is a crisis for society

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Perverse incentives in research careers lead to poor research practices prevailing. This problem may not necessarily be a problem for researchers as their careers can benefit from questionable research practices. The end users of science (such as government agencies, policy makers and wider society) are the ones who are negatively impacted by poor science and we argue here that the systemic change must come from them and not from within the research community alone.

SORTEE member voices – Michael Jennions

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Michael Jennions.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Professor of Evolutionary Ecology.

Research and/or work interests: sexual selection; behavioural ecology; evolutionary ecology.

Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Manchester, UK. And I was raised in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Where to find you online?:
http://thejennionslab.weebly.com/

[The opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by SORTEE.]

SORTEE member voices: Dylan Gomes

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Dylan Gomes.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.

Research and/or work interests: I am broadly interested in the wildlife conservation (especially human-impacts to wildlife), statistical methods (particularly LMM/GLMM), and the cultural and institutional practices in science (especially regarding sharing data and code, statistical/methodological choices, peer-review, and the hierarchical nature of research institutions and how this hierarchy influences author lists and workloads).

SORTEE member voices: Gerald Carter

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Gerald Carter.

Date: 02 July 2021.

Position: Assistant Professor.

Research and/or work interests: animal behavior, cooperation, communication, cognition, reciprocity, bats.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement?:
I think the greatest challenge for open, reliable, and transparent science is changing actual human behavior rather than just identifying what everyone should do. Scientists are less rational and altruistic than we think we are, and many of the traditional academic incentives are completely misaligned against the incentives for good science. For example, the academic goal of being influential does not ensure the scientific goal of being correct. We need academic incentive structures that both align with our higher collective scientific goals and also recognize and exploit the lower self-centered human goals of scientists. For example, science converges on truths by pitting our biased ideas against each other, demanding that we use evidence and logic to convince our worst critics, and forcing us to change our ideas when presented with counter-evidence. This process requires that we are rewarded for criticizing popular ideas, admitting to errors, and being uncertain and careful. Yet, our current academic system mainly rewards the opposite: being agreeable, seeking popularity and conformity, hiding mistakes, and being overconfident. How do we change academia to incentivize different behavior? That’s the challenge as I see it.

SORTEE member voices: Melina de Souza Leite

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Melina de Souza Leite.

Date: 2 July 2021.

Position: PhD Candidate.

Research and/or work interests: Community Ecology, Landscape Ecology, Demography.

What’s an open science practice or topic that you’ve changed your views on within the last few years? Why?:
I’ve learned a lot about the importance of standardized data management protocols (at least in the same project!), especially for metadata. Messy data, even if available in open repositories, don’t help much! :).

SORTEE member voices: Kaitlin Kimmel

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

[SORTEE Member Voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]

Name: Kaitlin Kimmel.

Date: 2 July 2021.

Position: Postdoc.

Research and/or work interests: Causes and consequences of biodiversity changes; functional traits; causal inference.

What strategies/approaches do you think are most likely to lead to a research culture change?:
I think that adapting pre-registration and the registered report format will drastically improve our science. I know that we often do not distinguish between exploratory and confirmatory analyses - we usually just write the paper that we think will be the most interesting at the expense of being more transparent. I also think it is a good practice to think about what questions we really want to answer before starting an analysis.

Code of Conduct

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Society for Open Reliable Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology (SORTEE) holds professional conferences and other events to enable its members to work to improve methods and practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines, build professional networks, and receive continuing education. SORTEE is dedicated to providing a harassment-free event experience for everyone, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, age, appearance, religion, or other group status. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form. Event participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled without a refund at the discretion of the SORTEE Board of Directors or event organizers.

Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Open Science – what’s the way (for Australia)? – Notes from a panel discussion

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

We all heard about Open Science, and particularly Plan S, which has been announced in Europe last year (read more here). On 14th February 2019, I had an opportunity to be a panelist during discussion on what it all could mean for Australia. The panel discussion was organised by Springer Nature as a part of the ALIA conference, which is the main meeting for the librarians and information specialists in Australia and New Zealand (I realised these are mostly lovely middle-aged ladies, although they said more men are starting to join this profession with the new technologies, closing the “gender gap”).

EcoEvoRxiv launched!

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

I am very excited to announce the launch of EcoEvoRxiv – a preprint server where ecologists and evolutionary biologists can upload their forthcoming papers. I am aware that many ecologists and evolutionary biologists already use the preprint service, bioRxiv and that’s great! I have used bioRxiv several times myself. EcoEvoRxiv is a more targeted server, and it is convenient because a preprint at EcoEvoRxiv can seamlessly integrate a project that makes use of the services at the Open Science Framework (OSF). My group (i-deel), like others, uses OSF for project management so this is a great feature of EcoEvoRxiv.

Join the Credibility Revolution!

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

Last week (14-15 Nov, 2018), I went to Melbourne for a workshop (“From Replication Crisis to Credibility Revolution”). The workshop was hosted by my collaborator and “credibility revolutionary” Fiona Fidler.

I suspect many workshops and mini-conferences of this nature are popping out all over the world as many researchers are very much aware of “reproducibility crisis”. But what was unique about this one is its interdisciplinary nature; we had philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists, lawyers, pharmacologists, oncologists, statisticians, ecologists and evolutionary biologists (like myself).

Prior probability and reproducibility

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

Physicist Carl Sagan famously said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I think its useful to extend this to the distinctly less elegant “surprising findings are less likely to be true, and thus require a higher standard of evidence.”

I started thinking more about what influences the reliability of a scientific result when analyses of my post-doc data weren’t lining up with published findings from other studies of the same species. When I encountered this problem with reproducibility, the causes I first focused on were old standbys like multiple tests of the same hypothesis driving up type I error and the flexibility to interpret an array of different results as support for a hypothesis. What I wasn’t thinking about was low prior probability – if we test an unlikely hypothesis, support for that hypothesis (e.g., a statistically significant result) is more likely to be a false positive than if we’re testing a likely hypothesis. Put another way, a hypothesis that would be surprising if true is, in fact, less likely to be true if it contradicts well-supported prior empirical understanding or if it is just one of many plausible but previously unsupported alternate hypotheses. Arguments that I’ve heard against taking prior probability into account are that it isn’t ‘fair’ to impose different standards of evidence on different hypotheses, and that it introduces bias. I think the risk of bias is real (we probably overestimate the probability of our own hypotheses being true), but I think the argument about fairness is misleading. Let’s consider an example where we have a pretty good idea of prior probability.

An iconic finding in behavioral ecology fails to reproduce

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

Just how reproducible are studies in ecology and evolutionary biology? We don’t know precisely, but a new case study in the journal Evolution shows that even textbook knowledge can be unreliable. Daiping Wang, Wolfgang Forstmeier, and co-authors have convinced me of the unreliability of an iconic finding in behavioral ecology, and I hope their results brings our field one step closer to a systematic assessment of reproducibility.

A conversation - Where do ecology and evolution stand in the broader ‘reproducibility crisis’ of science?

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

In this post, I float some ideas that I’ve had about the ‘reproducibility crisis’ as it is emerging in ecology and evolutionary biology, and how this emergence may or may not differ from what is happening in other disciplines, in particular psychology. Two other experts on this topic (Fiona Fidler and David Mellor) respond to my ideas, and propose some different ideas as well. This process has led me to reject some of the ideas I proposed, and has led me to what I think is a better understanding of the similarities (and differences) among disciplines.

Reproducibility Project - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

The problem

As you probably already know, researchers in some fields are finding that it’s often not possible to reproduce others’ findings. Fields like psychology and cancer biology have undertaken large-scale coordinated projects aimed at determining how reproducible their research is. There has been no such attempt in ecology and evolutionary biology.

A starting point

Earlier this year Bruna, Chazdon, Errington and Nosek wrote an article citing the need to start this process by reproducing foundational studies. This echoes early research undertaken in psychology and cancer biology reproducibility projects attempting to reproduce the fields’ most influential findings. Bruna et al’s focus was on tropical biology but I say why not the whole of ecology and evolutionary biology!

Why ‘MORE’ published research findings are false

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

In a classic article titled “Why most published research findings are false”, John Ioannidis explains 5 main reasons for just that. These reasons are largely related to large ‘false positive reporting probabilities’ (FPRP) in most studies, and ‘researcher degrees of freedom’, facilitating the practice as such ‘p-hacking’. If you aren’t familiar with these terms (FPRP, researcher degrees of freedom, and p-hacking), please read Tim Parker and his colleagues’ paper.

Replication - step 1 in PhD research

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

Here are a few statements that won’t surprise anyone who knows me. I think replication has the potential to be really useful. I think we don’t do nearly enough of it and I think our understanding of the world suffers from this rarity. In this post I try to make the case for the utility of replication based on an anecdote from my own scientific past.

Is overstatement of generality an Open Science issue?

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

I teach an undergraduate class in ecology and every week or two I have the students in that class read a paper from the primary literature. I want them to learn to extract important information and to critically evaluate that information. This involves distinguishing evidence from inference and identifying assumptions that link the two. I’m just scratching the surface of this process here, but the detail I want to emphasize in this post is that I ask the students to describe the scope of the inference. What was the sampled population? What conclusions are reasonable based on this sampling design? This may seem straightforward, but students find it difficult, at least in part because the authors of the papers rarely come right out and acknowledge limitations on the scope of their inference. Authors expend considerable ink arguing that their findings have broad implication, but in so doing they often cross the line between inference and hypothesis with nary a word. This doesn’t just make life difficult for undergraduates. If we’re honest with ourselves, we should admit that it’s sloppy writing, and by extension, sloppy science. That said, I’m certainly guilty of this sloppiness, and part of the reason is that I face incentives to promote the relevance of my work. We’re in the business of selling our papers (for impact factors, for grant money, etc.). Is this sloppiness a trivial outcome or a real problem of the business of selling papers? I think it may lean towards the latter. Having to train students to filter out the hype is a bad sign. And more to the point of this post, it turns out that our failure to constrain inferences may hinder interpretation of evidence that accumulates across studies.

Ecologists and evolutionary biologists can and should pre-register their research

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

I wrote a draft of this post a few weeks ago, and now seems like a good time for it to see the light of day given the great new pre-print just posted on OSF Preprints by Brian Nosek, David Mellor, and co-authors. They describe the utility of pre-registration across a variety of circumstances. I do something similar here, though I focus on ecology and evolutionary biology and I don’t try to be as thorough as Nosek et al. For greater depth of analysis, check out their paper. On to my post.

Ecological Society of America Ignite Session on Replication in Ecology

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

[This post has been originally posted on ecoevotransparency.org]

Fiona Fidler and Tim Parker organized an Ignite session on Replication in Ecology at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting 2017 in Portland, U.S.A a few weeks ago. Ignite sessions start with a series of 5 minute talks on a similar topic that are followed by a panel discussion. At Fiona and Tim’s session more than 50 attendees listed to talks by Fiona Fidler, Clint Kelly, Kim LaPierre, David Mellor, Emery Boose, and Bill Michener.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Us

The mission statement of SORTEE (the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) is broad and encompasses a plurality of activities and approaches. The priorities of the society are dependent on the enthusiasm and passion of volunteers, most of whom are students or early-career researchers. The founding motivation for SORTEE was to reduce ‘researcher strain’: the tension felt by researchers between the practices most likely to generate reliable knowledge, and those practices rewarded by publishers, funders, and hirers. While long-term institutional change is difficult, at the very least SORTEE provides a community to foster education, support, and camaraderie amongst people who care about open science. Join today: https://www.sortee.org/join/.

Bylaws

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other SORTEE policies can be found here.

The Terms of Reference for the Senior Advisory Board can be found here.

Article 1. Corporate Name and Offices

The name of this Corporation shall be SORTEE (Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology). The registered office of SORTEE shall be in the City of Salem, State of Oregon or at such office at such other places within or without the State of Oregon as the Board of Directors may from time to time determine.

Collaborative projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Collaborative projects

SORTEE hackathons and projects - what are they?

SORTEE hackathons are 1-2 hour virtual events held during annual SORTEE conferences. They usually facilitate group projects with well-defined goals, such as implementing advocacy actions, conceptualising or drafting documents, testing methods or software, etc. The list below presents descriptions of selected examples of past hackathons and related projects. If you would like to learn more, please contact the respective project leads (names provided below).

Hannah Fraser

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2021

Asia / Pacific

30 minutes

July 14th, 0100 UTC

Talk title: Meta-research from ecological and interdisciplinary perspectives

Talk abstract: Social and medical sciences have found that they obtain contradictory results around half of the time when they redo studies (much less in some fields). In ecology, it is difficult and expensive to redo studies and we expect far more variation in results due to environmental stochasticity, so we are unsure of how replicable the ecology literature is. There are a few ways of trying to evaluate this without breaking the bank: conducting multiverse analysis or a many-analyst study, partnering with other labs for large-scale collaborations, investigating the prevalence of practices known to lead to low replicability of results, and changing how we critically evaluate the literature. This talk will draw together interdisciplinary and ecological learnings on each of these topics to showcase some key advances in ecological meta-research.

Infographics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page hosts Open Science infographics created by SORTEE members.

2021

As part of the SORTEE 2021 conference, we organised a hackathon event to collaboratively work on infographics related to Open Science. We now finished two infographics from this event. You can provide us with your feedback on these, and/or express your interest in participating in future similar hackathons organised by the SORTEE Infographics Task Force. Please use this short survey form.

Join

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Membership

Become a SORTEE member in 2026

In 2022, we moved to a suggested membership fee model to support the society’s continued operation and growth (e.g., board insurance, website hosting, membership management software, stipends for monthly workshop and webinar speakers, legal and administrative fees, etc.).

We have kept the suggested annual membership fees the same since 2022 (amounts are in US$):

Senior-career professionals: $40 ($110 for 3 years)
Early-career professionals: $20 ($50 for 3 years)
Students: $10 ($25 for 3 years)
Pay No Fees: Free
Pay What You Can: Minimum $0.50 (50 cents)

Besides the Pay No Fees option (no questions asked), we are offering everyone an option to enter a different payment amount. This option is intended for people who need to pay less (e.g. to account for exchange rates or personal financial difficulty), and for those who have the means to pay more and would like to make a larger donation to support SORTEE’s activities.

Julia Stewart Lowndes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2021

Americas

30 minutes

July 12th, 1700 UTC

Talk title: Openscapes: Better Science for Future Us

Talk abstract: There is huge potential for open source software to accelerate scientific research, since it not only provides powerful analytical tools that increase reproducibility but also creates a new frontier for communication and publishing when combined with the open web. However, a fundamental shift is needed in scientific culture so that we value and prioritize data science, teamwork, and open practices, and provide training, support, and credit for our emerging scientific leaders. I will discuss my work to help catalyze this shift in environmental and Earth science through Openscapes (openscapes.org). Openscapes helps research teams reimagine data analysis, develop modern skills that are of immediate value to them, and cultivate collaborative and inclusive research communities. We do this primarily by mentoring cohorts of research teams through our Champions Program, which was designed based on my own Ocean Health Index team’s path to better science in less time (Lowndes et al. 2017). I’ll describe how open software facilitates kinder science (Lowndes 2019) and share examples of how Openscapes Champions teams from academia and government are working more reproducibly and transparently while contributing to the greater open movement.

Malvika Sharan

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2021

Europe / Africa

30 minutes

July 12th, 0900 UTC

Talk title: The Turing Way Guide to Reproducible, Ethical and Collaborative Research

Talk abstract: As researchers, we make complex choices around project design and decision making throughout the lifecycle of our research. We must ensure that our research objects are easily accessed, openly examined and built upon by others in future work. Although open and transparent reporting is necessary to ensure that scientific work can be trusted, it is also crucial to integrate consideration of the societal and ethical implications of our work: especially when it impacts people’s lives. Furthermore, reproducible research practices are important for ensuring that research methods, underlying data, analysis code and workflows can be independently verified. These require understanding of research best practices and skills that are often not widely taught or explored among academic researchers.

Michael Eisen

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2021

Americas

30 minutes

July 13th, 1700 UTC

Talk title: Making open science work at the toxic intersection between the business of publishing and the business of science

Talk abstract: Although The Internet was invented to help scientists communicate with each other, the publishing industry that controls how scientists share and get credit for their work has failed to embrace the myriad opportunities presented by the Internet to make the process more fair, effective and efficient. However, with the rise of author-driven publication (e.g. preprints) there is renewed optimism that things are finally about to change. In my talk I will discuss why the publishing system is the way it is, why it is so important that we fix it, and what the future should and - if we are successful - will look like, and what forces we are fighting against to make it happen.

Michael Jennions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2021

Asia / Pacific

30 minutes

July 13th, 0100 UTC

Talk title: A Drunkard’s Walk: from negative results to reverse P-hacking

Talk abstract: I have no formal training in statistics, meta-analysis, meta-science, open science or philosophy of science. None. My publications on these issues have always been tangential to my own research. But I have engaged with these topics over the years because of deep frustration with the publication process. It is an on-going challenge to be ethical while trying to get research published; and uneasy pacts have to be brokered between the devils and the angels to be a good PhD mentor in a field where numerous publications are an entry level requirement for an academic career. I can’t offer a deep analysis of the problems we face as ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Instead I will take the scenic route and describe my personal experiences over three decades. I will touch on publication bias, meta-analysis and P-hacking. I hope that this will, at least, give hints as to where real progress has been made, and to where reforms are still needed. It might even cause you to be more sympathetic to the failings of your older colleagues (i.e. my generation).

Newsletters

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page hosts links to archived newsletters produced by SORTEE.

Other resources

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page hosts an assortment of resources ranging from societies and organizations to tools, guides, videos and courses. Many of these resources have a general scope, but are still relevant to research practices in ecology and evolution.

While the resources below were mostly published by other parties, in the future we would love to create our own resources, tailored for ecology and evolution. For example, these may take form of slides, videos, or even one-page summaries of key concepts, workflows or tools. If you have specific requests, ideas or wish to contribute - please get in touch! If you know about any other relevant items, please contact SORTEE or somebody from our Education and Outreach or Media committees.

Past conferences

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Past SORTEE conferences

	Time in UTC	Slides	Program	Abstract Book
2025 Conference	15 Oct 07:00 – 16 Oct 10:00	OSF 2025	2025 App	Download
2024 Conference	15 Oct 07:00 – 16 Oct 10:00 UTC	OSF 2024	2024 App	Download
2023 Conference	17 Oct 07:00 – 18 Oct 08:30 UTC	OSF 2023	2023 App	Download
2022 Conference	11 Jul 04:30 – 13 Jul 07:00 UTC	OSF 2022	2022 App	Download
2021 Conference	12 Jul 07:00 – 14 Jul 08:00	OSF 2021	2021 App	Download

People

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Annual Reports on Committee Activities:

Board of Directors

This is an elected committee that is ultimately responsible for SORTEE. Three positions on the board come open each year and are elected by the members of SORTEE in November. These terms last for three (3) years. The Board can be contacted via email at contact@sortee.org.

Previous Board Members

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Former members of the Board of Directors

2023-2025

Ed Ivimey-Cook is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow.

2023-2025

Patrice Pottier is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales.

2023-2025

Alfredo Sánchez Tójar is a researcher at Bielefeld University, where he focuses on evidence synthesis and meta-research in ecology and evolution.

2022-2024
Kaija Gahm is a PhD student at UCLA, studying spatiotemporal dynamics of vulture social networks in the Pinter-Wollman lab.

Reading materials

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page hosts a list of reading materials on the topics related to the goals of SORTEE.

Light reading - popular articles / blogs:

Richard McElreath

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Conference 2021

Europe / Africa

45 minutes

July 13th, 0900 UTC

Talk title: Science is Like a Chicken Coop

Talk abstract: The quality and transparency of scholarship is influenced by professional incentives. So say we all. Naturally much discussion focuses on reforming incentives. But reforming scholarly incentives is not easy, and incentives may matter less than structural and demographic forces. Using analogies from population biology, I sketch some problems and opportunities for effective science reform. First, incentives arise from structure as much as from explicit reward. Second, incentives are not all—demography and development matter as well. Third, there are fundamental limits on the power of incentives when the fates of individuals are largely up to chance. There are reasons to think reform can succeed, especially if we adopt a dynamic and structured view of the cultural evolution of scholarly communities.

SORTEE awards

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Current Awards

SORTEE Commendation Awards

Award Description

The SORTEE Commendation Awards aim to highlight Projects that align with the aims and values of the society.
A Project is defined as any work that is an initiative benefiting the Eco-Evo community by fostering Open Science values or practices (e.g., journal clubs, workshops, seminar series, websites, repositories, tools, educational materials, public talks, podcasts, etc.).
Sharing open data and/or code alongside a publication or software output is strongly valued; however, the presence of these materials alone does not constitute a project aimed at fostering Open Science values or practices. This means that a single research article with shared data or code will not be considered unless it involves a sustained effort, resource, or activity designed to foster Open Science practices within the Eco-Evo community. Please see examples of successful project applications from 2025 on our website.
The SORTEE Commendation Awards recognise that Projects are often team efforts. As such, the contributions of all project members, rather than individuals, will be highlighted. Note that projects from single individuals can still be nominated.
We warmly encourage diverse nominations in terms of team membership (e.g., country, gender, professional background) and Project content (see eligibility criteria below).
We seek projects with broad and diverse types of impact (e.g., events or actions within a single institution, country or continent), as well as global (e.g., publicly accessible online events or resources). Citation counts will not be considered as a reliable evidence of impact.
There is no limit on the number of SORTEE Commendation awards given by the society per year. Any nominated Projects meeting the eligibility criteria listed below will be considered for a Commendation award.

Eligibility

Projects must contribute to fostering Open Science values or practices, such as transparency, robustness of research, or improvement of the scientific system/practice in general, going beyond simply implementing current practices or processes. Sharing data/code alongside a publication or software is not considered going beyond expected practices even if few people do it in a sub-field where it is uncommon.
Projects should be related at least remotely to the fields of ecology and/or evolutionary biology or closely related fields with implications for ecology and/or evolutionary biology (e.g. systematics, paleontology, marine biology).
Evidence of the project has to be provided, e.g., through photographs, websites, teaching/outreach materials, screenshots of news or social posts, recommendation letters, repositories, or preprints.
Either the person nominating the project, or at least one member of the Project team, must be a current SORTEE member (newly joined members are eligible).
Current SORTEE Awards Committee members, SORTEE Awards DEI Representative, members of the Board of Directors and Officers (the secretary, treasurer, past president, president, president-elect) are not eligible to nominate a Project, or be a member of a nominated Project. This means that projects where teams/contributors included these ineligible individuals are not eligible for the period these individuals are active in their SORTEE roles listed above. Such projects can be nominated when individuals in questions are no longer active in their SORTEE roles listed above.
Failure to acknowledge all project members/contributors by full name on the nomination form may render nomination ineligible. However, team members should have an opportunity to request not to share their name publicly on award announcement materials.

Nomination process

Project nominations can be submitted between April 1, 2026 and August 31, 2026 (23:59 UTC). This deadline ensures that the Awards Committee has sufficient time to review all nominations and obtain approval from the Board of Directors before the annual conference in October. Submissions received after August 31, 2026 (23:59 UTC) will not be considered in the current round and will be invited to re-nominate in the following cycle. Projects may be self-nominated by Project members, or nominated by individuals who were not Project members. The nominating person will serve as the contact for the nomination. The Awards Committee may reach out to them for any necessary clarifications and to communicate the outcome of the eligibility assessment. Project nominations must be submitted through an online SORTEE Project Award nomination form and use a nomination document template. The SORTEE Project Award nomination form requires the following information:

SORTEE code club

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Code Club

What is Code Club?

SORTEE Code Club is an online meeting where people come together to learn, share, and collaborate on coding-related topics in an informal and supportive environment. It’s not about being an experienced coder, it’s about open science, peer learning, and making coding more accessible, and most importantly reproducible for everyone.

Why Code Club?

At SORTEE we believe in transparency, reproducibility, collaboration and accessibility in research and coding is a big part of that!
The SORTEE Code Club is a place to:

SORTEE meet-ups at other conferences

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE members attend many different (in-person, hybrid, or online) conferences in different disciplines all around the world. The purpose of this page is to help you meet up with other SORTEE members at these conferences and / or to spread the word about SORTEE at these conferences.

Find out what SORTEE meet-ups have already been scheduled at in-person conferences.

Would you like to schedule a meet-up with other SORTEE members (or people interested in SORTEE) at the conference? We can then coordinate with you to advertise this meet-up on the SORTEE website and on social media. Please let us know that you want to organise a SORTEE meet-up here!

SORTEE Outputs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE Outputs

Journal and Preprint publications

Manuscripts related to past or current SORTEE hackathons or projects:

Braga, P. H. P., Hébert, K., Hudgins, E. J., Scott, E. R., Edwards, B. P. M., Sánchez Reyes, L. L., Grainger, M. J., Foroughirad, V., Hillemann, F., Binley, A. D., Brookson, C. B., Gaynor, K. M., Shafiei Sabet, S., Güncan, A., Weierbach, H., Gomes, D. G. E., & Crystal-Ornelas, R. (2023). Not just for programmers: How GitHub can accelerate collaborative and reproducible research in ecology and evolution. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14, 1364–1380. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14108 - [from SORTEE2021 Hackathon]

SORTEE workshops and webinars

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SORTEE members organise workshops and webinars. Details will be announced to SORTEE members closer to the events.

Join SORTEE to receive our updates.

Solicitation

To propose a workshop or webinar, please click here.

To request a workshop or webinar on a particular topic, please click here.

July 2026

Title: Lotteries and innovations in research funding allocation

Presenter: Rachel Heyard
Type: Webinar
Date and Time: July 7, 2026 at 08:00 UTC
Timezone(s): Europe/Africa/Australasia
Duration: 60 min
Summary: Research assessment shapes not only careers and funding decisions but also the culture of research itself. However, many current assessment systems, based on publication metrics or the expectations of linear career trajectories, were never intentionally designed, and therefore often fail to value what truly contributes to rigorous, innovative, and socially valuable research. This webinar shows how research on research can inform better funding decision-making. I will share real-world examples from my work as a statistician at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and my current research on funding and evaluation.
Register here

Supporters

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We are grateful for the financial support of these sponsor organisations!

2026 institutional supporters

2025 institutional supporters

2024 institutional supporters

Virtual Socials

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When? Every first Tuesday of the month

Come and meet or catch up with other SORTEE members over Zoom on the first Tuesday of every month! We’ll play games together (but no worries if you don’t want to play), and there will be plenty of time for chatting. Check the SORTEE Slack (#sortee-announcements) for details (time and link) each month. To receive calendar invites in your local time zone, sign up here.