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SORTEE member voices – Jason Pither

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Bo Johannesson

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Alexander Mielke

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Fredrik Jutfelt

[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.    

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SORTEE member voices – Susi Zajitschek

[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!    

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SORTEE member voices – Malika Ihle

[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).
   

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