The Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE) is having its first conference on July 12th-14th. Apparently, it will run continuously to cover all time zones, and membership in the society/conference participation is currently free.
Proposals for sessions or presentations are open until June 1st. I’ll comment again when registration is open.
Aside, SORTEE apparently got started during an unconference session at AIMOS 2020. It’s nice to see Open Science is building up more momentum in biology and ecology.
The inaugural conference of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE) will be held July 12-14*. The conference organizers are seeking content submissions for four types of sessions:
Many of SORTEE’s founders also contribute to this opinion article:
Unreliable research programmes waste funds, time, and even the lives of the organisms we seek to help and understand. Reducing this waste and increasing the value of scientific evidence require changing the actions of both individual researchers and the institutions they depend on for employment and promotion. While ecologists and evolutionary biologists have somewhat improved research transparency over the past decade (e.g. more data sharing), major obstacles remain. In this commentary, we lift our gaze to the horizon to imagine how researchers and institutions can clear the path towards more credible and effective research programmes.
I appreciate that they acknowledge Transparency is necessary but not sufficient:
The information afforded by greater transparency only helps us discriminate between studies if we care to look (Fig. 2). Transparency alone does not prevent errors, nor does it guarantee that research helps to build and test strong theories. For example, methods might not measure what the authors claim to be measuring, and authors might not specify their claims precisely enough to be falsifiable. If preregistrations and supplementary materials are not read, data are not examined, analyses are not reproduced, and, crucially, close replications are not conducted or published, then our mistakes will not be identified. Researchers will always make mistakes, but changed incentives could encourage errors to be corrected and dissuade researchers from rushing into hypothesis testing, cutting corners, or fabricating results [9]. Common wisdom within the scientific community is that fraud is so rare as to be ignorable, but we cannot really know, as we do not really check; mechanisms to detect, investigate, and prosecute cases of fraud and research misconduct are under-resourced and not standardised across institutions. The dearth of formalised error detection in ecology and evolutionary biology suggests that we do not live up to the scientific ideal of organised scepticism.
You can access the list of recorded plenaries and short presentations, as well as various other materials at our osf.meetings page:
https://osf.io/meetings/SORTEE2021/
Based on the feedback we received from the 2021 Conference, SORTEE plans to hold annual virtual conferences
We are looking for dedicated volunteers to help organize the SORTEE 2022 Conference
If you are interested in joining the 2022 conference committee, please visit our committee volunteer survey page as soon as possible. For a full list of committee volunteer opportunities, see below.
Content submissions are now open for the 2022 SORTEE conference, which will be held from the 11th-13th July.
The conference will be virtual and cover all time-zones to facilitate participation from all SORTEE members.
It will include invited & submitted talks, as well as interactive events (workshops, hackathons, structured & unstructured discussions).
Conference registration fees will be US$10 for current members of SORTEE (with a waiver option).
For non-members, registration will range from US$30 for students, US$40 for early-career professionals, and US$60 for senior-career professionals.
The content submissions deadline is June 1st. Find out more by going to Upcoming events
Content submissions deadline: 1st of June
Submit proposals for:
Participatory events
We want to facilitate lively exchanges of ideas, and so the following three event types will be the heart of the conference:
Unconferences : Facilitated discussions of ideas for how to make ecology, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines more open, reliable, and transparent. Facilitation involves moderating the conversation with ideas and examples, but there are no formal presentations.
Hackathons : Group projects with well-defined goals (papers, techniques, software, protocols, organizations, etc.).
Workshops : Facilitators will teach tools for implementing open, reliable, and transparent practices.
Short Presentations :
We also invite you to propose a presentation to share your experience with issues of openness, reliability, and transparency in scientific research that are relevant to people working in fields related to ecology and evolutionary biology. For example, you could reflect on failures in your own work and what they taught you, present tools or methods that can help others make their research more open, reliable, and transparent, present plans for an upcoming project, or present research that integrates open science practices in an inspiring way.
