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SORTEE member voices – Fredrik Jutfelt

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

Name: Fredrik Jutfelt.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Professor.
 

Research and/or work interests: Animal physiology and behaviour, thermal biology.
 

How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in open research after realising scientific misconduct and data fabrication occurs in my field. That started me, together with a group of friends, on a path to investigate papers with suspicious results. When looking for raw data from published papers I found that most authors don’t share their data even when the journals mandate it. This clearly needs to change and I think SORTEE is a great starting point.    

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SORTEE member voices – Susi Zajitschek

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

Name: Susi Zajitschek.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Lecturer.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in behavioural ecology and teaching.
 

How did you become interested in open research?
Scientific integrity is often taken for granted, and while for the vast majority of researchers there is no question about this, there are the occasional cases of misconduct, shady/patchy reporting or non-reproducibility. In the past, this may have happened “accidentally”, with no means of violating best practise, but just based on lack of awareness. I am really happy that in the last few years so much effort has gone into ORT, this is really the way forward for science!    

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SORTEE member voices – Malika Ihle

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

Name: Malika Ihle.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Reproducible Research Oxford coordinator.
 

Research and/or work interests: I’m a former behavioral ecologist who worked on mate choice and extra-pair behavior. I am now promoting open research across disciplines at the University of Oxford by providing training, building communities, and liaising with stakeholders to inform the design of incentives and policies. I am also acting as the local network lead of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN).
   

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SORTEE member voices – Rishika Dubla

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

Name: Rishika Dubla.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Research and/or work interests: I’m an evolutionary biologist, with an interest in sexual selection and conflict, and social behaviours in reptiles. Overall, I’m interested in the different interactions between the sexes and how that can lead to novel adaptations which exhibit plasticity and eventually drive the evolution of a species to adopt unique social systems. I’m particularly interested in these patterns in reptiles as often they’re considered ‘behaviourally inferior’ to mammals, though in fact they are very socially complex animals but receive limited attention. I’m also interested in scientific illustrations and dabble in a bit of sci art too! .
   

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SORTEE member voices – Dieter Lukas

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

Name: Dieter Lukas.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Group Leader.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in why we can find different social behaviour in different populations?
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I think we want to reconsider what counts as research output. Currently, the focus is on authorship on manuscripts, but researchers also share data, code, mentorship etc. We currently do not have a good system to acknowledge these additional shared outputs that are often critical in ORT research practices.  

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SORTEE member voices – Markus Eichhorn

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

Name: Markus Eichhorn.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Lecturer.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in forest ecology.
   

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?
In ecology there are a number of groups who control access to large global databases which, while ostensibly available to all, are often closed, in that access is determined by gatekeepers who determine who can use the data, the uses to which it is put, and the credit that derives from their use. Often the gatekeepers play only a limited role in obtaining the data itself, relying instead on networks of contributors whose work is inadequately recognised. Even more problematic is that these databases are held by researchers based in Global North countries, even while they extract data from the Global South. This is not merely a problem for open data but is an example of colonial practices in modern science.  

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