Current Awards
2023 Awards
Nominations for the 2023 SORTEE are open now - submit your nominations via GoogleForm.
The nominations will close on 1 October 2023 [ UPDATED DEADLINE! ].
The winners will be announced during the SORTEE2023 conference (17 October 0700 UTC to 18 October 0700 UTC) and then posted on the SORTEE website and social media.
This year we have two (redesigned) award categories: 2023 Student Award and 2023 Researcher Award - for details please see the descriptions below.
Aim
The awards provide recognition for open and transparent work in ecology and evolution. The intent of these awards is to facilitate uptake and promotion of Open, Reliable, and Transparent (ORT) science by students and researchers in ecology and evolution.
Prizes
We do not offer monetary prizes. The winners will receive a digital award certificate and their profile will be highlighted on the SORTEE website and social media. We may offer some other benefits, for example waivers of publication fees, depending on the generosity of our sponsors.
Nominations and Diversity Equity and Inclusion
SORTEE is committed to equal opportunity and fair assessment for all and seeks as diverse a pool of award nominations as possible. We warmly encourage nominations from historically marginalised or underrepresented groups (e.g., women, racial or ethnic minorities, people with disabilities or caring responsibilities). We allow self-nominations and nominations by others. After reading award descriptions please consider nominating yourself or nominate somebody you know.
Selection process
Nominations will be first reviewed for eligibility independently by two SORTEE Awards Committee members, with disagreements resolved via discussion with a third Committee member. Reviewers will be assigned so that they will not assess any nominations they may have a conflict of interest with (e.g., current or former students, recent collaborators, family members). Reviewers might consult additional publicly available material or ask referees to confirm eligibility or contributorship claims.
Nominations judged as eligible will be entered into a lottery that will be a stratified random draw (ensuring winners are not all the same gender and do not all come from the same country). The Awards Committee will determine the eligibility threshold scores and number of winners based on the number and distribution of scores of the received nominations. Award winners will be publicly announced during the annual SORTEE conference and the winners will be also notified via email.
Assessment criteria
The criteria for judging submissions are partially based on TOP journal guidelines (TOP = Transparency and Openness Promotion), modified for application to individual publications (the modified rubric is available at the bottom of the Awards page).
We emphasize that making publications Open Access is NOT a criterion for the awards, as this typically requires access to substantial funds. However, making a penultimate version of an officially accepted manuscript publicly available (e.g., on a preprint server, institutional repository) is a good practice, and is now permitted by almost all publishing outlets. When assigning the scores, reviewers will take into account available information on the barriers and difficulties to implementing ORT practices on the case-by-case basis to make assessment equitable.
All steps that are taken to improve the transparency and reproducibility of ecological or evolutionary research are valuable and appreciated. Achieving the “ideal” workflow in practice will, for many of us, be a life-long endeavour and learning experience!
We therefore encourage all eligible students and researchers to apply, regardless of how far along this path they are. For example, somebody may not have implemented many or any ORT best practices from the outset of their research career because they initially did not have access to the training and support necessary. Thus, their earlier work may be less transparent and reproducible than their later work. This is entirely expected, and should not discourage you from applying for this award.
Expectations of the winning nominees
The winners must agree to have their full name, affiliation, photo (optional), short bio (optional), and a link to relevant information about the contribution/activity placed on the SORTEE website (they can also contribute a blog post to SORTEE website). All award winners are expected to meet the commonly held standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity, a breach of these standards may result in cancellation of the award at the discretion of the Awards Committee.
2023 Awards Committee
The 2023 consists of Clint Kelly, Hannah Dugdale, Sandra Hamel, Kari Norman, Malgorzata Lagisz (Chair). The committee reserves the right to seek additional information on the nominated candidates and to decide on the eligibility threshold scores and the number of the winners per award category. Decisions of the Awards Committee are final. The Awards Committee may be able to provide some feedback on the unsuccessful applications after the announcement, at a reasonable request.
Contact
Inquiries may be directed to Malgorzata Lagisz at losialagisz@gmail.com (please note that the nominations should be submitted via links to online submission forms, as provided below award descriptions).
2023 Student Award
Award Description.
This award aims to recognize and reward student researchers who have endeavoured to implement best (Open, Reliable, and Transparent = ORT) practices within their research workflow, thereby increasing the transparency and reproducibility of their research activities in broadly defined fields of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Eligibility
- Applicants must be currently registered as students (any level) in a legitimate educational institution. They can be enrolled either full-time or part-time, with or without a scholarship.
- Applicants must be members of SORTEE at the time of application (note that there is a membership fee waiver for potential members who cannot afford the membership fee).
- Applicants’ nominated research must be primarily in the fields of ecology or evolutionary biology.
Application materials
- Personal information: full name, affiliation, gender, preferred pronouns (optional), country of residence, country of origin (self-defined).
- Link to a personal or institutional webpage (optional).
- A brief description (maximum 500 words) of why you (or your nominee) are deserving of this award, and referring to evidence and examples (accessible through URLs / DOIs) of how you have integrated ORT practices into your research workflow as a student researcher. Also mention how your work is relevant to ecology or evolutionary biology. You should primarily highlight your own (or your nominee’s) ORT contributions while clearly identifying contributions from supervisors and collaborators.
- A brief description (maximum 500 words) of other elements of ORT that you wish you (or your nominee) had applied to the research, but were limited by financial constraints, access to certain resources, bureaucratic restrictions, or any other barriers.
- Upload of any relevant additional files, for example, an article you are particularly proud of, or relevant materials not available online. Please do not upload recommendation letters or CV.
- Provide name, affiliation, and email of potential Referee 1 and Referee 2.
Applications.
Please submit via GoogleForm.
2023 Researcher Award
Award Description
This award aims to recognize and reward researchers who have made consistent and long term contributions to open science in various forms including publications, preregistration, data or software sharing, and outreach (e.g. the presentation of seminars and workshops), benefitting broadly defined ecology and evolutionary biology.
Eligibility.
- Applicants must NOT be currently registered as students (any level) in a legitimate educational institution. Except this, researchers (self-defined) from any legitimate institution and at any career stage are eligible to apply.
- Applicants must be members of SORTEE at the time of application (note that there is a membership fee waiver for potential members who cannot afford the membership fee).
- Applicants’ research must be primarily in the fields of ecology or evolutionary biology.
Application materials
- Personal information: full name, affiliation, gender, preferred pronouns (optional), country of residence, country of origin (self-defined).
- Link to a personal or institutional webpage (optional).
- A brief description (maximum 500 words) of why you (or your nominee) are deserving of this award, and referring to evidence and examples (accessible through URLs / DOIs) of how you have integrated ORT best practices into your research workflow as a non-student researcher and your contributions to open science in general. Also mention how your work is relevant to ecology or evolutionary biology. Your letter should primarily highlight your own (or your nominee’s) contributions while clearly identifying contributions from supervisors and collaborators.
- A brief description (maximum 500 words) of other elements of reproducibility or open science that you wish you (or your nominee) had applied to the research, but were limited by financial constraints, access to certain resources, bureaucratic restrictions, or any other barriers.
- Upload of any relevant additional files, for example, an article you are particularly proud of, or relevant materials not available online. Please do not upload recommendation letters or CV.
- Provide name, affiliation, and email of potential Referee 1 and Referee 2.
Applications
Please submit via GoogleForm.
2023 Disclaimers / Acknowledgements
The information provided on this page is partially modeled on AIMOS awards and other publicly available research awards descriptions.
Past Awards Winners
2022
2022 Open Science in Practice PhD Student Award
Name: Patrice Pottier
Pronouns: he/him/his
Twitter: @PatriceEcoEvo
Website: patricepottier.owlstown.net
Affiliation: The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Profile: I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at UNSW Sydney. While my interests are broad, I am primarily interested in the responses of animals to rapid environmental change. Particularly, I strive to understand what drives the variation in plasticity and adaptation to changing temperatures. My research is question-driven rather than organism-driven, and I enjoy working with a broad range of organisms. I use a combination of data synthesis, meta-analysis, and laboratory experiments to address my questions in various species. I am also an advocate for Open Science and a member of the board of directors of The Society for Open, Reproducible, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE). Outside of academia, I love surfing, traveling, and eating all the vegan food the world has to offer. [more at: https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284886214/peerj-award-winners-sortee-2022/]
2022 Open Science in Practice Postdoctoral Award
Name: Korryn Bodner
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Affiliation: Unity Health Toronto, Canada
Twitter: @KorrynBodner
Profile: My main research focus is on the epidemiology of infectious diseases. I primarily study emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern (VOCs) and how heterogeneities in contact patterns and vaccination strategies can affect transmission dynamics. Through this work, I have also become engaged in studying the effects of different types of biases that can undermine the results of our mathematical and statistical models. As an example, recently I have explored how unknown and underlying differences in contact and testing patterns between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals can lead to an underestimate of the benefits of a given vaccine. More broadly, I am also interested in developing strategies to increase reproducibility and to better connect scientific research with decision-making. This area of focus is particularly rewarding as its utility extends beyond any particular model, ecological scale, or specific research purpose. [from (and more at): https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284886214/peerj-award-winners-sortee-2022/]
2022 Promotion of Open Science Award
Name: Silas Bossert
Affiliation: Research Entomologist at Washington State University
Profile: I am an evolutionary biologist studying the phylogeny and evolutionary history of bees. I am fascinated by the parallel evolution of bees and plants over the past 125 million years and by the many ways bees live. Through the phylogenetic lens, I strive to understand the natural history of bee-plant interactions, their antiquity, and the evolution of parasitism in bees. We know of over 20,000 described species of bees and many more await to be discovered. [from (and more at): https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284886214/peerj-award-winners-sortee-2022/]
2021
2021 Open Science in Practice Masters Student Award
Name: Shivani
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Affiliation: University of Göttingen, Germany
Profile: My broad research interests are in Behavioral Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Mainly, I work with Primates and try to understand the different forces that shape their behavior. I am keen on using interdisciplinary approaches to understand the behavior of different life forms and aim to keep my research as open and transparent as possible. Currently, for my PhD research, I look at the social and ecological drivers of female fitness in a wild population of Assamese macaques.
2021 Open Science in Practice PhD Student Award
Name: Nicole Torres-Tamayo
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Affiliation: School of Life and Health Sciences, University of Roehampton, London, United Kingdom
Twitter: @Paleonicole
Profile: Nicole Torres-Tamayo is a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Life and Health Sciences of the University of Roehampton (London, United Kingdom). She investigates the evolution of human childbirth by studying the pelvis morphology of extant primates. She also has a background in Paleoanthropology and she is currently working on the reconstruction of the fragmentary fossil pelvis of H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis using 3D virtual techniques. During her early career and with her PhD impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Nicole became aware of the importance of data sharing and open science in research. This is paramount in the field of Paleoanthropology, where there are too few fossils from which people draw too many conclusions, sometimes without allowing others to check the actual remains. Her next step as a post-doctoral researcher is the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine of the University of Zurich, where she will continue actively working on promoting transparency and reproducibility in science.
2021 Open Science in Practice Postdoctoral Award
Name: Benjamin H. Paffhausen
Affiliation: Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Centre de Biologie Intégrative (CBI), University of Toulouse, CNRS, UPS, Toulouse, France
Profile: I want to understand the social communication in the honey bees brain during waggle dance. I started when the open source microcontroller Arduino was becoming popular. The code copying mindset got me and I immediately understood that sharing openly is the only way forward. I investigated color vision in honey bees with an Arduino driven illumination arm. This gave us great data sets that were sufficiently repetitive to analyse across animals. I took the servo-motor library and wrote a bit of code for the machine to scan along. Inaccessible for me before open source, but with it: a joy. Later we put a bee on a quad-copter while we recorded brain activity to investigate the animal’s navigation. The electrical engineers of reddit shared with me how to design the electronics board. Earlier I recorded bees' brain activity in their hive to investigate free and motivated social behaviour, impossible without the collaborative work that was done on the Raspberry Pi to monitor my bees. Those and other projects of mine focus on the peculiar behaviour of the honey bee and quickly accessing them by taking useful snippets from others. All works were acknowledged and given back.
Past Awards Descriptions
2021 - 2022 Open Science in Promotion
This award aims to recognize and reward researchers who have made consistent and long term contributions to open science in various forms including publications, data sharing, and outreach (e.g. the presentation of seminars and workshops).
Two separate awards were available in 2022: one for early career (5 or fewer years post-PhD) and one for established (>5 years post-PhD) researchers.
Application materials:
(i) A letter (maximum 500 words) describing why you are deserving of this award, and referring to evidence and examples (accessible to adjudicators through URLs / DOIs) of how your publication and the work that went into it exemplifies Open Science best practices and the promotion of Open Science.
(ii) An up-to-date resumé (maximum 2 pages as a .pdf)
(iii) A list with explanations of open science contributions
2021 - 2022 Open Science in Practice
This award aims to recognize and reward researchers who have endeavoured to implement best practices in Open Science (OS) within their research workflow, thereby increasing the transparency and reproducibility of their research activities.
Three separate awards are available each year: one for Masters students (current, or <12 months since degree conferred), one for PhD students (current, or <12 months since degree conferred), and one for postdoctoral research associates (< three years since doctoral degree conferred).
All steps that are taken to improve the transparency and reproducibility of research are valuable and appreciated, and achieving the “ideal” workflow in practice will, for many of us, be a life-long endeavour and learning experience! We therefore encourage all eligible researchers to apply, regardless of how far along this path they are. For example, a graduate student or postdoc may not have implemented many or any OS best practices from the outset of their research career because they initially did not have access to the training and support necessary. Thus, their earlier work may be less transparent and reproducible than their later work. This is entirely expected, and should not discourage you from applying for this award.
Application materials:
(i) A letter (maximum 500 words) describing why you are deserving of this award, and referring to evidence and examples (accessible to adjudicators through URLs / DOIs) of how you have integrated OS best practices into your research workflow as a graduate student or postdoc.
(ii) An up-to-date resumé (maximum 2 pages).
(iii) A brief document (maximum 300 words) describing other elements of reproducibility or open science that you wish to have applied to your research, but were limited by financial constraints, access to certain resources, bureaucratic restrictions, or any other barrier.
Criteria:
The criteria for judging submissions are based on TOP journal guidelines modified for application to individual publications. We emphasize that making publications Open Access is NOT a criterion for the awards, as this typically requires access to substantial funds. However, making a penultimate version of an officially accepted manuscript publicly available (e.g. on a preprint server, institutional repository, or personal webpage) is good practice, and is now permitted by almost all publishing outlets.
TOP Rubric for Publication Assessment
(1 point for each checkbox)
- Data, Analytical Methods, Code, and Research Materials Transparency
- Did the author (hereafter applicant) indicate that the data, methods used in the analysis, and materials used to conduct the research are publicly available.
- Did the applicant make the data available at a trusted digital repository? (Note: If all data required to reproduce the reported analyses appears in the article text, tables, and figures then it does not also need to be posted to a repository.)
- Did the applicant include all variables, treatment conditions, and observations described in the manuscript?
- Did the applicant provide a full account of the procedures used to collect, preprocess, clean, or generate the data?
- Did the applicant provide program code, scripts, codebooks, and other documentation sufficient to precisely reproduce all published results?
- Did the applicant provide research materials and description of procedures necessary to conduct an independent replication of the research?
- Design and Analysis Transparency
- Did the applicant report on the process by which they followed standards for disclosing key aspects of the research design and data analysis. For example, did the applicant review the standards available for many research applications from http://www.equator-network.org/ and use those that are relevant for the reported research applications?
- Preregistration of Study
- Did the applicant, in acknowledgments or the first footnote, indicate if they did or did not pre-register the research in an independent, institutional registry?
- If an applicant did preregister the research, the applicant must confirm that the study was registered prior to conducting the research with links to the time-stamped pre-registrations at the institutional registry, and that the preregistration adheres to the disclosure requirements of the institutional registry or those required for the preregistered badge maintained by the Center for Open Science.
- Did the applicant report all pre-registered analyses in the text, or, if there were changes in the analysis plan following preregistration, those changes must be disclosed with explanation for the changes?
- Did the applicant clearly distinguish in text analyses that were preregistered from those that were not, such as having separate sections in the results for confirmatory and exploratory analyses?