98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

IGN 2

Sharing Makes Science Better

Scientists too often labor alone. The need to closely guard ideas during the race to immortalize them in professional publications can make the practice of science crushingly lonely and ill-informed by tools and knowledge that could make science easier and better. Occasional scientific meetings are often the only opportunities to share ongoing work and connect with colleagues outside of one’s immediate working environment. But there’s a fertile online science ecosystem of innovation, collaboration and mutual support that carries on all year round, and its lifeblood is a network of scientists and science lovers who openly share tools, data, knowledge and ideas that help all researchers to do stronger, better, faster science. The rapidly growing open source and online science communities suggest a new model of doing science in which we build our work on tools, data, knowledge and ideas that are freely offered and contribute our own in return. This session features several free and open-source tools that ecologists have created specifically to help fellow researchers do the work of ecological science, as well some other tools we didn’t create but have tried and found enormously useful. We encourage our colleagues to try them, improve upon them, and perhaps most importantly, share what they’ve learned so that others can benefit as they have.