By Rachel Turba | March 6, 2026
This was my first time doing something like this. Seeing the lack of representation of members from South America, I wanted to build a stronger SORTEE network in Brazil and foster conversations and practices of Open Science locally. My feeling is that we are falling behind, even though the country spearheaded important movements in this direction, like the Scielo Network back in the 1990s, and has one of the world’s largest number of diamond Open Access journals. However, the current system is strongly tied to metrics of evaluation that not only disincentivize best practices in Open Science, but also exacerbate inequities both regionally and internationally, with consequences to many aspects of academic life, from graduate student recruitment to faculty hiring. The Brazilian national common CV database, the Lattes Platform, is used to register every curriculum, research group and institutions in the country, and is connected to most funding agencies, providing a powerful source of data about what scientists are doing. However, it limits the types of documents one can include in the CV, and does not currently allow for citing preprints, for example.
As I moved back to Brazil and became a member of the Brazilian Reproducibility Network (BRN), I thought this exercise of building the Brazilian network would be simple, but now I see what a naïve thought that was 🙃! First, different from SORTEE, the BRN seeks representation from all fields of science, which makes it harder to find people interested in Open Science aspects specific to the Ecology and Evolution field. But I did encounter a few Biologist members, and some are already part of SORTEE, which was a great start 💯.
I created a public Slack channel in the members workspace that was open to anyone to join, if they wanted to. Then, I advertised it via other Slack channels, newsletter, as well as sending direct messages to people that I already knew. After we had gathered around 8 people in the channel, we had a first round of introductions and one online meeting to share a little bit about us, and our ideas for the group. It was really nice getting to know everyone, and learning what people were doing, and from that some really cool connections happened in partnership with the Brazilian Reproducibility Network 🤝. I also led a pre-conference event in Portuguese as part of the SORTEE Virtual Social programme, to introduce the society to an audience that might not be very comfortable with speaking in English. The idea for this proposal led to another cool initiative from the Conference Committee in having a welcoming session in multiple languages during the conference, where I was able to help in the Portuguese room as well.
Gathering Brazilian participants through SORTEE events produced some results, but not surprisingly, these are members distributed all over the globe. Thus, they still represent people who are likely more comfortable speaking in English, and who might be distant from the issues Brazil is currently facing. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since the community is meant to be multi-facetted and enriching and everyone has unique experiences and backgrounds to share. But I am still missing a more local movement 🌎.
Maybe with time, as the SORTEE Brazil Chapter solidifies, and member participation at local events increase, we might be able to reach out more broadly. I have already represented the society at a talk I gave at the Federal University of Paraná, by invitation of one of the other SORTEE members who was an organizer of the event (Matheus Salles), and we have plans of repeating that at another local conference next year. I will also mediate a roundtable on Open Science in Genomics at the Brazilian Genetics Conference, where I will be able to talk about SORTEE as well.
The first step is always the hardest, but I understand it is part of the process. Nothing comes out perfect at the beginning, but if we keep our efforts steady and focused, we might be able to reach far 🏃♀️. And if you are also thinking about starting a local chapter for your region, please reach out to me via Slack 💬. I want to gather a group of like-minded people so we can brainstorm ideas and help each other on this journey! 🛣