Abstract (accepted)

Academia functions like a ‘tragedy of the commons’ dilemma: Open Science practices have the potential to benefit the entire research community (and beyond), but remain underutilised due to incentive structures that reward novelty over reliability and publications in high-impact journals. In recent years, ‘conditional pledge’ platforms (e.g., Kickstarter, Collaction) have proven to be a powerful tool in solving comparable collective action problems, but this concept remains to be implemented within academia. Here, I will present Project Free Our Knowledge, a conditional pledge platform for researchers that aims to facilitate the collective uptake of open and reproducible research practices. I’ll give a quick background to the project, introduce some new campaigns that are relevant to the ecology and evolutionary biology community, and invite conference attendees to join us in creating a new wave of cultural change within academia.

Questions from the audience