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

“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.

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PeerJ Award Winners at SORTEE 2023

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.

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Complexities of reuse and synthesis in the open data landscape

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.

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SORTEE member voices – Félicie Dhellemmes

[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.

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