Member-Voices

SORTEE member voices – Gabe Winter

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

Name: Gabe Winter (they/any)

Date: 2 June 2023.  

Position: PhD candidate at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany.
 

Research and/or work interests:
I am an ecologist, currently working with intra-individual variability in behaviour, but also super excited about open, transparent and reproducible research and data science.
   

What ‘ORT’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Having well documented R scripts have improved a lot my own reproducibility. Before, when I had to pause my analysis for a couple months (during field/lab work season, for example), it used to be tricky to remember what I was doing, and I usually had to start everything from the beginning. Now, using commented R markdowns I can simply continue from where I stopped every time. It takes some time to comment everything, but that same time (and more) is saved when I don’t have to re-analyse from scratch.
   

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SORTEE member voices – Erlend B. Nilsen

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

Name: Erlend B. Nilsen.

Date: 9 July 2021.  

Position: Senior researcher / Professor.
 

Research and/or work interests:
I’m an applied quantitative ecologist, working mainly with bird and mammal populations. I’m particularly interested in human impacts (such as climate change, harvest, and land use patterns) on these species’ populations, including distribution, abundance demography, and life history traits. To address these challenges, we statistical analyses of empirical dat and simulation of studies. Lately, I have also been involved in research in disease ecology. In addition, I have a strong interest in how we manage hard-won ecological data to the best of the research community and society at large.
   

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SORTEE two-year anniversary: our members’ voices

Between June and September 2021, we started the #SORTEEvoices blog series by asking inaugural members to choose a few questions to answer from a list of 30 options (15 questions about open science, reproducibility, and transparency; 15 miscellaneous questions)¹. Responses from sixty-four inaugural members were posted on our blog every week until October 2022. To celebrate SORTEE’s 2-year anniversary in December 2022, we’d like to look back and summarise our members’ voices.

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SORTEE member voices – Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

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

Name: Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar.

Date: 06 September 2021.
 

Position: Principal Investigator.
 

Research and/or work interests: I’m an evolutionary ecologist with a soft spot for birds and a great interest in evidence synthesis, meta-research and open science.
   

How did you become interested in open research?
I became interested in open research during my PhD and mostly as the result of multiple failed replication attempts of a textbook example in behavioural ecology, the badge of status or signalling status hypothesis in house sparrows. During my PhD I was also surrounded by a few persistent colleagues that would not stop talking about low reproducibility, low replicability, reduced data and code openness, etc… so it was relatively straightforward for me to become more and more interested in these topics, and to feel more and more the need for changes in the way we do science.    

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SORTEE member voices – Owen Petchey

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

Name: Owen Petchey.
 

Date: 19 July 2021.
 

Research and/or work interests: Ecological responses to environmental change.
   

How did you become interested in open research?
Some years ago I was particularly interested in a published research report that included the data. I wanted to know more about how the quantitative analyses were done. So I downloaded the data, and set about reproducing the analyses. From that grew further interest, and then a class during which I and the participants worked on several similar reproductions. We learned a lot about how to prepare research reports and data so that they could be readily reproduced (and what not to do!). Some of the reports are published here: http://opetchey.github.io/RREEBES/    

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SORTEE member voices – David Wilkinson

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

Name: David Wilkinson.
 

Date: 18 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
 

Research and/or work interests: Joint species distribution modelling; occupancy modelling; computational reproducibility; version control; code/data sharing practices.
   

How did you become interested in open research?
It wasn’t really the “open research” concept directly that first interested me, but as a primarily methods-based quantitative ecologist it was code and data sharing that made my PhD research possible, and from there I got into other practices.    

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