By SORTEE | January 17, 2022
[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
Name: Paul Robinson.
Date: 03 July 2021.
Position: Conservation Manager, Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Sierra Leone.
Research and/or work interests: Bird and mammal population assessment through a mix of field methods (passive acoustic monitors, camera trap and more traditional site sampling) and analytical methods for imperfect detection (occupancy and spatial capture recapture) implemented in R.
How did you become interested in open research?
Being unable to reproduce results from scientific papers.
What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Switching to the command line and R code that can be shared.
If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
More and better statisticians would be involved through the lifetime of projects.
If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
As with Altman’s quote for medical research, I would ensure less and better research and removal of the incentives to publish.