 Next up, we have Lausche Laggisch with incentivizing open science via research and publication awards. Thank you. Can you hear me? Thank you for the opportunity to present at this conference. It's really, really exciting to be here. So my talk has two parts. First part is about completed project where we surveyed best paper and best research awards available to early career and mid-career researchers in ecology and evolution. In the second part, I will present an ongoing project where we widened our focus and we look just at best paper awards, but across all disciplines and all career stages. And I will present some preliminary results. I need to start from acknowledging my contributors. For this first project, those were ecologists and evolutionary biologists representing four different continents and different career stages. Why we decided to look at awards? They are not just carrots for researchers. They actually reflect our scientific systems, culture and our values. So they also come with some practical implications for individual researchers such as getting some cash, invitations to present plenary talks, covering conference travel, but also providing and opening new opportunities for collaboration, networking, funding and ultimately jobs. Shouldn't we look at those big and famous awards like the Nobel Prize? Because they come with lots of public attention, media attention and of course lots of cash, but such awards usually go to senior researchers. And we know that when it comes to late career awards, there is quite often, most of the time, a clear bias, a clear issue because there is very little diversity among the winners. And this has been raised actually a long time ago and unfortunately there was no much progress in addressing this issue. And our committees usually say, oh, we cannot do anything because they are just not enough diverse, high quality nominees. But why is that? What's the root of the problem? So probably there is no single simple answers and there are many contributing factors, but we think one of the mechanisms is the Matthew effect. You already heard about it multiple times during this conference. And it's kind of in a nutshell, it's what you know from all sayings like success breeds success, rich get richer. In context of awards and this problem, it's what happens where you get at your late career is largely determined at your mid-career stage and also your early career. And if you start from a privileged position and you experience early success, you are most likely to proceed to those higher levels. But on the flip side, if you start from under privileged position, you are most likely to accumulate this disadvantage and drop off or stay at very low ranks of academia if you manage to stay. And because there was already quite a lot of research on late career awards and those early and mid-career awards were not studied, we decided to focus just on those. So we knew that in ecology and evolution at least and we started from this discipline because that's our background. There are two main types of awards. One is best researcher award which is awarded for the body of your achievements, usually multiple publications and other activities. And those are usually awarded by societies. And the other one is best paper award which is for a single published article. So we conducted a survey of international journals and societies that are not focused on specific sub-discipline but broad ecology and evolution. And we wanted to ask multiple questions and one is which awards from those that are available will foster equitable access and assessment, how they would do that and whether they value open science practices called sharing data sharing, pre-registering, replicating or just transparently reporting your methods. And we also quantified gender ratios in the list of past winners to look at historical trends. Overall, for both types of awards what we realized there is usually very little transparency and descriptions are either missing or vague and unclear. So we quite often don't know who does the assessment how they do that or even sometimes even how to apply. And typical award description is something like oh, this is an award for excellent research or this is an award for outstanding contribution whatever that means. So some specific selected results for 13 best researcher awards that we assessed somehow nowadays most of them provide flexibility in terms of eligibility period. If you had career interruption they can take it into account and that's great news. But only four out of 13 allowed self-nomination which means that most of the time a young researcher will need somebody senior or supportive colleague to nominate them and write recommendation letters which may actually be a problem for those from underrepresented minorities or those who lack confidence to ask for some references and it also can potentially introduce some biases in the assessment process. And finally we only found a single award that explicitly valued open science practices. And this is an award that was established last year by SOTI Society for Open Reliable, Transparent Ecology and Evolution. So no surprises, they value this. But none of the others. Before 2010 usually there were many more male winners than female winners but in last 10 years this ratio became equal which actually reflects the gender ratio at this career stage in ecology and evolution. So now 10 best paper awards and those are usually awarded by specific journals. So here some still offer this flexible eligibility criteria so they will take into account your career interruptions but sometimes it's even not relevant because they may say okay it just needs to be researched that you've done during your PhD or undergrad studies and that's okay no time limit or maybe vase but it's hidden. Most of them surprisingly allow self-nomination and they make it really really easy. So when you submit a manuscript you just tick a box saying I want to be considered for this award and I think I'm eligible because I'm a young career researcher. And is this surprising? Okay nobody. So no comment on this. Before 2010 again more male than female winners and after 2010 again this ratio became equal somehow. Okay we can move now to part two and look at all disciplines and all career stages. And now my team is much bigger and I work with people with many different disciplinary backgrounds and different career stages and all six continents. So what we did this time we focused just on awards from top hundred journals from SIMARGO journal ranking and we also looked at the societies that are associated with those journals because sometimes journal is run by society there is no information on the journal page but society has awards and one of them could be for best article. And so most of them associated with the journal many also with a learned society and out of 232 eligible awards we realized that 20% don't have any award description. They just have an award name and then list of the winners. And most of them can go to any career stage researchers but there is also a small group around 38 awards that are specifically targeting mid and early career researchers. And here six were offering some flexibility in terms of career interruptions. It's a much lower rate than previously in ecology evolution but still something, okay, could be more. 60% provided at least a vague statement who will be doing assessment and most of the time they would say our journal editors will pick the best papers. So we scored that as yes but still there were remaining 40% that didn't say anything. Almost 80% had no clear assessment criteria. Again, they would just say something or it's gonna be for best article for outstanding contribution or excellent research. And we found one, one of around 200 that explicitly mentioned something related to open time and they said one of the criteria is transparency of the methods. So conclusions so far from those two projects are that overall generally there is little transparency we don't know how those awards are given out and potentially in many cases there are issues with potential issues with accessibility and equitability of the assessment. Almost nobody values open science so clearly not important. And at least in ecology evolution there was some shift in last 10 years towards more equitable awards in terms of gender. So somehow something happened that they started looking at it and addressing this problem without changing any assessment criteria it was possible. Probably it was result of lots of publications coming out bringing up this issue of gender imbalance. We don't know what's happening with other biases there because it's much harder to collect data so there are potentially some positive developments there but overall it gives us hope that if we start talking about other issues there will be some change. So we recently published a paper describing our first project and we make 12 recommendations for making awards more equitable and accessible and more open. And one of the recommendations like all of them actually the picture is messed up so most of those things are already been said and they are really easy to implement so we hope that our land societies and journal editors will start making some little changes but we think that actually this is a great untapped opportunity to incentivize open science. And the final carrot, yes. Thank you. Thanks for that talk. Tell me first whether or not many of these papers were sole authored papers or multi-authored papers and if the person who is getting the award is say the first author on a long list of authors. It depends on the... if it's like an award for best paper across disciplines it looks like it's a mixed bag. Quite often it's for the whole paper and they don't look who is the author kind of but sometimes you can have a specific person and they put a buyer and say this person got his award for this paper and usually they would require it's a first author or a corresponding author. Given that if there are a bunch of multi-authored papers in this dataset I wonder if there's room to include either in the theoretical framework or the analysis. Some sort of analysis of Matilda effects where the credit is actually going to somebody else other than the person who gets the award by virtue of them being associated with an award-winning paper rather than being the award winner themselves. Yeah, it's possible. That would require actually disentangling who contributed what to that paper which might be tricky if there is no good credit statement at least and yeah, credit statement could be biased as well too. So yeah, it's a good idea and we are thinking about doing follow-up analysis on the actually authors and papers themselves for both projects. Thank you for the question. Just a comment on the publishing venue. It's behind a paywall. Your paper that you just recommended. The recommended paper, your paper, is not open access. Yes, I know but it's published as a preprint as well. Yeah, thank you.