AIMOS 2019

7 & 8 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

CONFERENCE COORDINATION

Fallon Mody
Andy Head
Dan Hamilton
Hannah Fraser
Fiona Fidler

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Martin Bush
Dan Hamilton
Fiona Fidler
Mathew Ling (Deakin, AIMOS committee)
Jennifer Beaudry (Swinburne, AIMOS committee)

SOCIAL MEDIA

Andy Head
Hannah Fraser

Find presenters’ slides, posters and videos: https://osf.io/ej635/

Invited speakers

Keynote Address

Simine Vazire is a professor in the Department of Psychology at UC Davis, USA. She studies meta-science and research methods/practices, as well as personality psychology and self-knowledge. Simine received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2000 and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. She has been an editor at several journals, including Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science from 2015 to 2019 and founding co-senior editor of the open access journal Collabra: Psychology. Together with Brian Nosek, Simine founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS). She served as the first president of SIPS and continues to serve on the executive committee. She also serves on the board of PLOS and BITSS and was a member of the executive committee of the Association for Psychological Science. She was awarded the Leamer-Rosenthal prize for open social science from BITSS, and the APA’s distinguished scientific award for early career contribution to psychology.

Closing Address

Adrian Barnett is a professor in the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He graduated from University College London with a BSc in Statistics in 1994. After that he worked for SmithKline Beecham and the Medical Research Council as a statistician before coming to Australia to do a PhD. He completed his PhD in Mathematics in 2002. His research interests include meta-research, research funding, data sharing, peer review and reducing research waste. He is the current president of the Statistical Society of Australia. His main interest is how to increase the value of health and medical research.

Speakers

Professor Virginia (Ginny) Barbour is the Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group, and has a part time professorial position at the library and the Office of Research Ethics & Integrity at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. Her advocacy for open access began at PLOS in 2004 as one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine. She was the journal’s first Chief Editor, ultimately becoming PLOS Medicine and Biology Editorial Director. She chaired the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) from 2012 to 2017. She has a medical degree from Cambridge University, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. She has participated in the development of reporting guidelines and in many other publishing and ethics initiatives, including the DORA International Advisory board. She is also currently on the NHMRC's Research Quality Steering Committee https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/research-quality.

Professor David Vaux AO is the Deputy Director of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI). He graduated in medicine from the University of Melbourne, and completed a PhD at WEHI before a post-doctoral placement at Stanford University. His research is concerned with the molecular mechanisms of cell death, however he has a strong interest in research integrity and the seamier side of science. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and was awarded the Victoria Prize for Science in 2003. David is also a member of the board of directors of The Center For Scientific Integrity, the parent organization of the Retraction Watch blog.

Fiona Fidler is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, with a joint appointment in the Schools of BioSciences and History and Philosophy of Science. She is broadly interested in how experts, including scientists, make decisions and change their minds. Her past research has examined how methodological change occurs in different disciplines, including psychology, medicine and ecology, and developed methods for eliciting reliable expert judgements to improve decision making. She originally trained as a psychologist, and maintains a strong interest in psychological methods. She also has an abiding interest is statistical controversies, for example, the ongoing debate over Null Hypothesis Significance Testing. She is a current Australian Research Council Future Fellow, leads the University of Melbourne’s Interdisciplinary MetaResearch Group (IMeRG), and is lead PI of the repliCATS project.

Jevin West is an assistant professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and co-founder of the DataLab and the ‘Calling Bullshit’ curriculum. He is also an Adjunct Faculty in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute and Affiliate Faculty for the Center for Statistics & Social Sciences at UW. He develops methods for mining scientific text, citations, mathematical equations and figures. He uses these tools to investigate the origins of scientific disciplines, the social and economic biases that drive these disciplines, and the impact the current publication system has on the health of science. More information can be found at jevinwest.org.

Hilda Bastian was a long-time consumer advocate in Australia, whose career turned to studying and analysing research and communicating about it. She is a writer and cartoonist, currently studying factors affecting the validity of systematic reviews after publication. Hilda has worked on PubMed projects at the NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the US, and for the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Healthcare in Germany. She is one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration.

Bob Reed received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1985. He is currently professor of economics at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He has taught at Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Oklahoma. Professor Reed has published in the areas of labor economics, public choice, public finance, and applied econometrics. His work has appeared in numerous professional journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Oxford Bulletin of Economics & Statistics, Health Economics, and Research Synthesis Methods. His recent research interests include replication and meta-analysis.

James Heathers is a research scientist working with Professor Matthew Goodwin on bio-signals and meta-science research. James’ research is focused on data science and personal health informatics. Prior to joining Northeastern, Heathers worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Poznan University of Medical Sciences researching Electrocardiology. He earned his PhD and MS degrees from the University of Sydney.

Rachael Brown is the Director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences and a lecturer at the School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Rachael’s work is at the intersection of the philosophy of biology, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science, with a particular focus on the evolution of cognition and behaviour. When not doing philosophy, Rachael enjoys experimental cooking and exploring Canberra's museums with her kids.

Eric Vanman is an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, which he joined in 2007 after holding academic positions in several American universities. His research interests include the social neuroscience of emotion, social media, robotics, and racial prejudice. His studies have incorporated several kinds of psychophysiological and neuroimaging methods.

Hannah Fraser is a post-doctoral researcher in IMeRG at the University of Melbourne and the Diversity and Inclusion officer on the AIMOS committee. She graduated from her PhD in the Quantitative and Applied Ecology group at the University of Melbourne in 2018. Hannah is passionate about understanding how ecologists can change their research practices to increase the reliability, rigor, and reproducibility of their findings. Her research interests include Questionable Research Practices, replication studies, preregistration, registered reports and anything that might improve scientific practice.

Shinichi Nakagawa graduated from his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2007 and worked as a lecturer at the University of Otago before taking a position at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Shinichi is an ARC Future Fellow, the Deputy Director of Research at Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at UNSW, a co-founder of “Transparency in Ecology and Evolution”, co-founder and co-chair of the steering committee for EcoEvoRXiv and an elected member of the Society of Research Synthesis Methodology. His research interests include animal behaviour, evolutionary biology, applied statistics. His current work covers transgenerational inheritance of environmentally induced phenotypes in birds and lizards, and robust inference and reproducibility in ecology and evolution

Open Forum panel speakers

Dr C. Glenn Begley is a clinical haematologist and medical oncologist, whose academic and commercial roles include board level and senior positions in Australia, the USA and the UK. Prior to joining BioCurate, Dr Begley held the position of Chief Scientific Officer at Akriveia Therapeutics (Califormia), Chief Scientific Officer at TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals (Pennsylvania) and , from 2002-2012, Vice-President and Global Head of Hematology/Oncology Research at Amgen. During this time, he became interested in the issue of research integrity and scientific reproducibility.Before joining Amgen, Dr Begley had over 20 years of clinical experience in medical oncology and hematology. His personal research focused on regulation of hematopoietic cells and translational clinical trials. Dr Begley studied Medicine at undergraduate and postgraduate level at The University of Melbourne.

Jennifer Beaudry is a passionate advocate for open science practices. As Academic Director (Research Training) for the School of Health Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology, she oversees approximately 200 Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students. Jennifer is committed to engaging HDR students and their supervisors in research practices that increase transparency, openness, and integrity. She is the academic lead for the Swinburne Open Science Task Force, is on the founding executive committee for the Association for Interdisciplinary Metaresearch and Open Science (AIMOS), and on the steering committee for the Melbourne Open Research Network. Jennifer’s own research sits at the intersection of Psychology and Law. Her main focus is on factors that influence eyewitness identification decisions, how eyewitness identification evidence is used by decision-makers (e.g., jurors, lawyers, judges), and how this evidence should be presented in court.

Matthew Page is a Research Fellow in the research methodology division of the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University. He leads a programme of research on methods for evidence synthesis, which builds on the research undertaken during his PhD (2011-2015) and NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (2015-2019). He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol, UK, from 2015-2017. Matthew's research interests span many areas of evidence synthesis, including examination of the transparency and reproducibility of systematic reviews; methods to address reporting biases (e.g. publication bias, selective reporting bias); tools to assess risk of bias in randomized trials and non-randomized studies of interventions; and examination of selective inclusion of results in meta-analyses. He is leading the 2020 update of the PRISMA reporting guideline for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and is a co-editor for the 2019 edition of the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. He frequently collaborates with clinicians on systematic reviews of interventions for a range of conditions, which often informs his research agenda. He is a co-convenor of the Cochrane Bias Methods Group, and member of the editorial board for the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology and PLoS Medicine.

Hayley Jach is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. Under the supervision of Luke Smillie (University of Melbourne) and Alan Pickering (Goldsmiths, University of London), she is investigating the mechanistic bases of personality traits Extraversion and Openness/Intellect via a combination of cognitive-behavioural paradigms, physiological methods, and mathematical modelling. She is a keen advocate of interdisciplinary research, best scientific practices, and science communication.

AIMOS Program Schedule

AIMOS2019 will be a partially unstructured conference. Each of the two days will have a theme, and will start with a series of keynotes or shorter, what we are calling “mini-notes”, followed by a more unstructured part of the day.

We aim for AIMOS2019 to appeal to students and researchers from a range of disciplines with a shared interest in understanding and addressing challenges to replicability, reproducibility and open science. AIMOS2019 will cover a broad range of open science and scientific reform topics, including: pre-registration and Registered Reports; peer review and scientific publishing; using R for analysis; open source experimental programming; meta-research; replicability; improving statistical and scientific inference; diversity in scientific community and practice; and methodological and scientific culture change.

See the full aimos2019 schedule now. We’ve moved day 2 to the top (scroll down for day 1)

Confirmed workshops, hackathons, unconferences and posters

The call for workshops, unconferences and hackathons is currently closed. However, additional spaces have been allocated for on-the-fly programming on Day 2. AIMOS2019 attendees will be able to pitch proposals for these spaces between 9am - 5pm on Thursday November 7th.

Workshops:

Franca Agnoli (University of Padova, Italy) - Voicing Values about Statistical Decisions

Kristian Camilleri (University of Melbourne, Australia) - An Introduction to Philosophy of Science in Practice

Vanessa Crosby (University of NSW, Australia) - Mapping a Collective Pathway to Collaborative, Open Research

Geoff Cumming (La Trobe University, Australia) - Estimation: Why and How, now with R

Thomas Shaffee (La Trobe University, Australia) - Getting your Work Read by 1M People: Open Science via Wikipedia and its Sister Projects

Nicholas Tierney (Monash University, Australia) - Rmarkdown for Scientists

Saras Windecker (University of Melbourne, Australia) - Taking your R skills to the next level: four great strategies for reproducible research

Hackathons:

Hannah Fraser (University of Melbourne, Australia) - Maximising the diversity and inclusivity of AIMOS

David Howells (University of Tasmania, Australia) - Quality in preclinical science

Eden Smith (University of Melbourne, Australia) - Developing Resources in Contemporary Philosophy of Scientific Practices for Scientists

Unconferences:

Jason Chin (University of Sydney, Australia) - Adapting metascientific research and reform to improve the legal system

Ian Gordon (University of Melbourne, Australia) - Challenges in Open Science - Statisticians’ Perspectives

Mathew Ling (Deakin University, Australia) - Supporting the modernisation of research practices: Efficiency, Scalability, Openness

Matthew Page (Monash University, Australia) - Making evidence synthesis more rigorous and reproducible: what can we learn from other disciplines?

Tim Parker (Whitman College, Australia) - Systematic replication to evaluate bias in ecology and/or evolutionary biology

Tim Parker (Whitman College, Australia) - Practical considerations when conducting replication

Bob Reed (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) - Why Aren’t There More Replications?

Andrew Vonasch (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) - Science Wiki: A viable alternative to journal publishing?

Poster presentations

In addition to our plenary speakers and afternoon sessions, the following posters will also be on display in the foyer of the Arts West Building from Thursday to Friday.

A dedicated poster viewing session has also been scheduled on Thursday November 7th between 12.30pm-1pm to allow conference attendees to interact with our poster presenters.

Posters can viewed by clicking on the respective name and title below.