Category Archive: Open Science

Thoughts on preregistering my research

Last week, I submitted the methods for the project I’ve recently started to the Center for Open Science’s Preregistration Challenge. Briefly, the goal of the challenge is to get more scientists to preregister their research, and it’s got a monetary incentive. The goals of preregistration itself are to increase transparency and reproducibility in scientific research. …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/11/16/thoughts-on-preregistering-my-research/

Making science products Open: an informal guide to copyright and licensing

I grew up a hacker (in the original sense) and thus a True Believer in open knowledge. And so, when it came time to start publishing science, I figured I’d make all my products Open. But it turns out that there’s a bewildering array of things to think about if you want to do so. …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/10/19/making-science-products-open-an-informal-guide-to-copyright-and-licensing/

The thing that pushed me to post a preprint

I have mixed feelings about preprints. On one hand, I like the fact that they allow for the exchange of ideas on pace with the rate that science happens. On the other hand, in ecology, the concept is preprints is all muddled. In the fields where preprints originated and are now standard practice (physics, math, …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/09/14/the-thing-that-pushed-me-to-post-a-preprint/

Open data, authorship, and the early career scientist

About a year ago, my coauthors and I published a huge dataset of more than a million annotated images of animals from a camera trap network in the Serengeti. The lead author, Dr. Swanson, and I are both early career scientists, and we both put a ton of time and effort into this dataset. We …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/06/15/open-data-authorship-and-the-early-career-scientist/

Thoughts on my first double-blind peer review

Not too long ago I agreed to review a paper after skimming the abstract and looking up the journal. When I went to actually do the review, I saw that the journal has a double-blind policy, and so I couldn’t see the names or affiliations of the authors and they couldn’t see mine. (The latter …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/06/01/thoughts-on-my-first-double-blind-peer-review/

Observation as an essential ecology skill

In the past few weeks, there have been several posts on ecology blogs about what is ecology — and science more generally. What makes us scientists? What is valued within our profession? I often think about these questions in the context of citizen science. What makes us ‘professionals’? What are we able to do that …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/03/16/observation-as-an-essential-ecology-skill/

Analysis preregistration gets a big boost in the form of a million dollars

The Center for Open Science has recently issued The $1,000,000 Preregistration Challenge. What is preregistration? Briefly, the idea is to reduce “researcher degrees of freedom.” Researchers often explore their data and then make data-processing and analytical choices based on the data that will be analyzed. But this can lead to biased results and incorrect scientific …

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Permanent link to this article: http://ecologybits.com/index.php/2016/01/18/analysis-preregistration-gets-a-big-boost-in-the-form-of-a-million-dollars/