Blogs

SORTEE member voices – Victoria Hemming

[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).    

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SORTEE member voices – Daniel Hoops

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Marko Bracic

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Lauren White

[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.
   

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SORTEE member voices – Alkistis Elliott-Graves

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Timothy Clark

[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.    

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