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SORTEE member voices – Andrew Kadykalo

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Andrew Kadykalo.
 

Date: 03 July 2021.
 

Position: PhD candidate.
 

Research and/or work interests: Andrew Kadykalo is a PhD Candidate in the department of Department of Biology and Institute of Environmental and Interdisciplinary Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is also a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation and Environmental Management (CEBCEM). He is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist who applies natural and social science tools, including policy-relevant systematic evidence syntheses, interviews, and cognitive mapping to explore relationships between people and nature. His research interests focus on predicting the delivery of regulating ecosystem services (e.g. pollination, flood regulation), and the use of evidence in wildlife management and biodiversity conservation. He is a Research Impact Canada (RIC) engaged scholar, A Community on Ecosystem Services (ACES) fellow, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) fellow in wildlife management, and is engaged in Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) functions as an early career researcher..
 

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SORTEE member voices – Benjamin Marshall

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Benjamin Michael Marshall.
 

Date: 03 July 2021.
 

Position: Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: Animal movement and spatial ecology.
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I would like to see less emphasis placed on novelty. I see great value in undertaking the same research as others independently, be that a deliberate repetition or in isolation. Examining differences/similarities between research efforts can not only show interesting variation in the study subject, but also in the way researchers conceptualise and tackle a question. I’d love to see a greater appreciation for the value of repeated non-novel work and how it can build towards a more confident consensus. Deprioritizing novelty could relieve fears of being scooped and the rush to publish; relaxing time and publication pressure in science is sorely needed. There is little sense in building something up if the foundations are not solid.    

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SORTEE member voices – Rob Knell

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Rob Knell.
 

Date: 03 July 2021.
 

Position: Reader at Queen Mary University of London.
 

Research and/or work interests: Evolutionary ecology, more specifically how mating systems influence adaptation, extinction and population dynamics. Animal contests and the evolution of weaponry. Disease ecology on occasion. Statistics.
 

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Recording data analysis as an rmarkdown document rather than just a script. This allows a much more extensive record to be kept along with the output from the analysis as well as the code, and is much easier to understand when you come back to an analysis some time after it was done. You can then publish the rmarkdown file along with a paper, either as an appendix or a supplementary file or with the data file in a repository like Dryad. This way the code and the full output of the analysis is open and available. Everyone benefits: we benefit because our records are as good as they can be, and anyone interested in our publication benefits because the full analysis is available.    

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SORTEE member voices – Jason Pither

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Jason Pither.
 

Date: 03 July 2021.
 

Position: Associate Professor.
 

Research and/or work interests: Ecology.
 

What institutional policies do you see as most important to change to improve the reliability of science? (‘institution’ broadly defined including funders, journals, universities, etc.)
Universities need to change promotion and tenure assessment policies to explicitly value ORT. A few universities have implemented such changes, but this needs to become standard worldwide. Early career researchers need to know from the start that their ORT efforts are valued.    

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SORTEE member voices – Bo Johannesson

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Bo Johannesson.
 

Date: 03 July 2021.
 

Position: Principal Research Engineer.
   

If you had the power to change one thing about current research practices in your field, what would it be?
I would change the practice of collecting lots of data before good planning.    

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
The importance of using observational experiments and manipulative experiments together to build research programs that are both focused and adaptive is undervalued. Researchers should also be clear about how limited the firm conclusions are from those investigations we refer to.    

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SORTEE member voices – Alexander Mielke

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Alexander Mielke.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: Primatology; Social Relationships; Cooperation.
 

What’s an ‘ORT’ subject or practice that you think deserves more attention?
I think we need to move from storing data in article-specific repositories (such as Dryad or Github) and towards a platform-system where raw datasets are publicly available. Access to data is a limiting factor for getting involved in ecological research, and currently raw data are still largely unavailable. Field Sites and labs should have standardised data-storage protocols, and there should be databases where labs working on similar topics can publish their data in a comparable format, removing barriers and allowing for comparable analyses.    

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