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In five years, the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE) has grown from a small network of like-minded researchers into a grassroots, international community. Founded in late 2020, SORTEE works to make ecology and evolutionary biology more open, reliable, and transparent at a time when prevailing incentives in academia often reward novelty and quantity over rigour. The society is run largely by early-career researchers and sustained by volunteers and small donations. Around this community, SORTEE has built a portfolio of services and infrastructure: EcoEvoRxiv, a community-governed preprint and postprint server; an annual virtual conference; monthly Code Clubs; a regular workshop and webinar series; and collaborative meta-research projects. The society also produced the first standardised guidelines for data and code quality control in ecology and evolutionary biology, now used by data editors at multiple journals. Over the next five years, SORTEE aims to build on this momentum to promote evidence-based change in how research is funded, conducted, evaluated, and taught, with a particular focus on education, regional outreach, advocacy, and meta-research to inform science policy. SORTEE offers a model for how volunteer-led communities can help drive cultural change in research.
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Parker et al. (2026) studied this question.