Blogs

SORTEE member voices – Matt Grainger

[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..
 

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SORTEE member voices – Patrice Pottier

[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!    

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SORTEE member voices – Hannah Fraser

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Wendy Thorogood

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Kimberley Mathot

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Peter Mikula

[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.    

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