About Us
The mission statement of SORTEE (the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) is broad and encompasses a plurality of activities and approaches. The priorities of the society are dependent on the enthusiasm and passion of volunteers, most of whom are students or early-career researchers. The founding motivation for SORTEE was to reduce ‘researcher strain’: the tension felt by researchers between the practices most likely to generate reliable knowledge, and those practices rewarded by publishers, funders, and hirers. While long-term institutional change is difficult, at the very least SORTEE provides a community to foster education, support, and camaraderie amongst people who care about open science. Join today: https://www.sortee.org/join/.
History of SORTEE
SORTEE was launched in December 2020 by a group of 22 founding members, who had met periodically online since November 2019. The seeds of SORTEE were planted in 2015, when our founding president Tim Parker co-organised a workshop at the Center for Open Science (COS) alongside Shinichi Nakagawa and Jessica Gurevitch titled ‘Improving Inference in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology’. One of the goals of the workshop was to promote the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines to journals; the majority of the 44 participants were journal editors, including 18 editors-in-chief for Ecology and Evolution journals. The workshop resulted in the creation of the Tools for Transparency in Ecology and Evolution (TTEE) checklists (still available), a website, and a mailing list (which has since been replaced by SORTEE). At the time that TTEE was developed, 2015, COS was at the forefront of documenting problems with research transparency and reliability which became known as the “replication crisis”, and which helped establish SIPS: the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (co-founded by Simine Vazire and Brian Nosek). Tim Parker attended one of the SIPS in-person meetings, and was inspired to start something similar for ecologists and evolutionary biologists: a community-driven society of people trying to improve the quality and reliability of research.
SORTEE’s membership grew rapidly in the era of COVID-19 lockdowns, and our first virtual conference in July 2021 attracted 769 registrants from 63 countries. Plenaries from that and subsequent conferences are available on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/@SORTEcoEvo. Meanwhile, 2021 was a year of bureaucracy for the founding Executive Committee to lay the groundwork for SORTEE’s future. In February 2022, SORTEE became a registered not-for-profit organization based in Oregon, USA, and introduced flexible membership fees to cover operational costs and support activities to promote open, reliable, and transparent science.
Get involved
You can help promote open science by telling your friends and colleagues about SORTEE. To find our social media accounts and more, go to https://linktr.ee/sortecoevo. Much of SORTEE’s membership is actively engaged in contributing to the society (e.g., in 2024 there were 70 volunteers across 10 committees). No prior experience is necessary to join a SORTEE committee, and — if you have the time to do so — volunteering can be an incredibly enriching experience. You will develop valuable transferable skills while working with researchers from all around the world who care about open science. The work of SORTEE’s committees is detailed in our annual reports, which are publicly available here. The call for volunteers for the following year is sent to SORTEE members around October. If you miss this window but are still eager to volunteer for SORTEE, you are welcome to reach out of committee chairs directly (find their contact details at https://www.sortee.org/people/) or email sortecoevo@gmail.com for more information.