September 20, 2026
Open science at ISBE
The 20th Congress of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE) took place from 20th to 24th July 2026 at the Lingotto Conference Centre in Torino, the first time ISBE met in Italy. According to the opening talk, more than 1,100 people attended, and fourteen of these were SORTEE members. We wanted to share what open science looked like on the ground at ISBE, so we asked the SORTEE members who were there to write about their conference experience.
SORTEE had a booth at ISBE, organised by Juliette Tariel-Adam, with two SORTEE members looking after it at each break. The booth ran a lottery, a collaborative board, an open science bingo and quiz. On the first day of the conference, Cecilia Baldoni and Juliette Tariel-Adam conducted a SORTEE workshop titled The ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of open science practices.
In numbers
- 14 SORTEE members at the conference
- More than 1,100 ISBE attendees, from 65 countries
- 90 individual interactions at the booth
- 59 people who registered for the lottery
Individual voices
Each of the SORTEE members below wrote their own account of ISBE. These are personal, independent reflections, and they don’t speak for SORTEE as a whole.
Juliette Tariel-Adam (she/they)
Postdoc at Macquarie University
Research interests: behaviour and evolution of marine fish
I had a great time at the ISBE conference – though, to be honest, not at first. As the person organising the booth and workshop, I was pretty stressed beforehand: what if it didn’t run smoothly, or nobody showed up? But by the end of just one day, I felt relieved. I was supported by so many amazing SORTEE volunteers, and the booth ended up drawing so many people! I got the feeling that people were glad to find a space where they could discuss how science is conducted and organised, rather than just discussing the findings in behavioural ecology. In my experience, you can feel quite isolated when you’re the only one in your team questioning the publication system, inequalities and so on. – so finding people who have come to the same conclusions as you about the problems in research and who want to find and implement solutions is like a breath of fresh air. On the collaborative board we’d set up at the stand, participants mainly expressed their concerns about job insecurity and the lack of diversity in research. I would say that the two biggest highlights for me were finally meeting in person some of the people I’ve been working with in SORTEE (one of them since 2023!) and seeing how many people turned out at our booth.
Kaija Gahm (she/her)
PhD Candidate, UCLA
Research interests: Movement ecology, social behavior, vultures
It was so cool to meet other SORTEE members in person! I’ve seen all these heads in Zoom meetings talking about open science, but at the conference I got to chat with people about their research. When everyone’s in Slack threads, it’s easy to forget everyone except the few people you happen to be talking to. I found it really heartening how many people were there celebrating SORTEE, some of whom I don’t know yet. For SORTEE members thinking about attending ISBE next time, my advice is to deliberately set aside time in your conference schedule to head over to the SORTEE table and take a break from talks by having a nice chat with some of the other folks there. It can be so cool to see how principles of open science apply across a variety of subfields and meet your peers from other institutions.
Michael Bertram (he/him)
Member of the SORTEE Board of Directors; Principal Research Scientist, Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, Australia; Assoc. Prof. (Adjunct), Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
Research interests: Ecology, human-induced environmental change, behavioural ecology, ecotoxicology, movement ecology
The ISBE meeting in Torino was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet new ones, and to hear about the latest research going on in behavioural ecology. The SORTEE booth was an amazing success, thanks primarily to the dedication and organising skills of Juliette Tariel-Adam, as well as all of the contributions made by other SORTEE members. It was a pleasure to spend time chatting about open science and I heard lots of positive feedback about the SORTEE booth and the conference more generally. It was particularly interesting to hear from people from all across the distribution in terms of their familiarity with open science. I got the sense that there was a real enthusiasm across the people I chatted with in terms of making their own science more open, reliable, and transparent, as well as contributing to the broader open science community. I really enjoyed these conversations and hope to have many more at future events—even better if it’s in places with gelato as good as Torino!
Pietro Pollo (he/him)
Research Assistant at Charles Sturt University / Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales
Research interests: research biases, sexual selection, human‑driven environmental change
I had never met any of the SORTEE members who were at the conference before, at least not in person. It was great to finally get to know those I’ve been working with within SORTEE as well as to connect with other members. I presented my research on taxonomic bias, in which I investigated why/how researchers choose the organisms they study. Although it was exciting to share my findings with so many people, it was a little stressful since my presentation was scheduled for the last day of the conference. Nonetheless, my experience in Turin (my first time in Italy) was fantastic! I’m looking forward to the next ISBE meeting!
Corné de Groot
Postdoc LMU-Munich / Visiting fellow University of Zürich
Research interests: Social evolution, Plasticity, Phenotypic variation, Selection
It was very nice to meet in person with some of the people I have only seen online during SORTEE events. Meeting in person always adds some extra dimension, and provided the opportunity to learn more about their research, SORTEE activities and personal interests. Overall it was great to see so many behavioural ecologists interested in SORTEE and ORT research practices in general. In particular it was great to see many students at the SORTEE booth who were already aware of several ORT practices! Moreover it was good to see that there were sessions specifically dedicated to ORT such as the SORTEE session, and the session about replication studies within the journal of behavioural ecology by Kate Laskowski. Furthermore during several talks I heard mention of open repositories, replication, and preprints, showing that ORT practices are getting adopted in our field. I’m already looking forward to seeing new and current SORTEE members at the next ISBE!
What kept coming up
Read side by side, the five accounts converge on something interesting: the part of a behavioural ecology conference that stuck was not the behavioural ecology. Most of us knew each other as faces in a Zoom grid or names in a Slack thread, but none of us had met in real life before. Everybody described this as the highlight of their experience representing SORTEE at ISBE 2026. The booth gave us a rough census of where open science sits in behavioural ecology. Ninety conversations across four days covered the whole range, from people coming across the idea for the first time to students who already knew several open, reliable and transparent practices and wanted to learn more. The rest of the programme said the same thing from a different angle, with a session on replication studies in the journal and mentions of open repositories, replication and preprints turning up inside ordinary talks. Open science in behavioural ecology is past the stage of needing an introduction. The collaborative board highlighted issues of job insecurity and the lack of diversity in research, and the conversations at the table kept drifting from how to share your data to how the whole Open Science is organised and who it works for.
What next?
If you met us at ISBE, the way to keep talking is to become a SORTEE member and join us on SORTEE’s Slack space. The SORTEE 2026 conference is coming up soon online. The Conference will run on Zoom from 13 October 07:00 UTC to 14 October 09:15 UTC, spread across all time zones, and it is free for members. One booth led to another: conversations with the Oikos representative in Torino, SORTEE was offered a booth at the Nordic Oikos conference in Odense. If you are heading to a conference yourself, the meet-ups page explains how to organise a SORTEE meet-up there, or request SORTEE promotional material for a booth of your own.