Contact the American Society of Naturalists to find more information about how to become a participating society.
Participating socieities will distribute an IRB-approved anonymous survey to their members every 6-12 months. They will also help us identify scientists who are willing to speak publicly on the benefits of science and the downsides of political interference in science.
No, no financial commitment is needed.
This website is maintained by the American Society of Naturalists. The survey is developed, distributed, and analyzed by scientists who are volutneering their time to this effort.
The survey and research plan has been approved by Northeastern's Institutional Review Board (IRB# 25-03-14.). All data are collected and stored in compliance with Northeastern's document management guidelines and federal policies.
The survey is distributed through an anonymous link by a secure software at Northeastern University. The link is sent by participating societies to their members directly via email. The system does not record the respondent's IP address, location data, or contact info.
Participants may risk being indirectly identified from their society(ies), state(s), and career stage. This latter risk is mitigated in multiple ways. First, responses to all survey questions were optional. Second, data is not be stored in the format it is collected - responses to potentially identifying questions was separated from other responses and their order randomized for long-term data storage following each round of the survey. Third, investigators do not have access to the membership lists of societies, which remain private with the society from which you received this survey link. Fourth, IP address and location information are not collected.
In addition, participants may risk their privacy or confidentiality in the level of detail they decide to include in the open-ended responses. Any identifying information in open-ended responses was removed prior to analysis, publication, and data storage. Participants had the option to give us permission to quote their narrative, with identifying information removed, anonymously on the website. The following steps were taken to de-identify the responses:
Replacement of the name of a state with a region name if other information in the response could be used to identify the individual
Replacement of specific pronouns (she/her he/him) when used to refer to a person and replaced with noun (e.g. the name of the position) or ungendered pronoun (they/them).
Replacement of specific dates or months with vague indicators of the time of year
In some cases, acronyms were spelled out for clarity
Redaction of specific clauses, such as the specific name of a lab, program, institution, or agency, in the case that in combination with other identifying information it could be used to identify the respondent
Spelling and grammatical errors were not edited.
All quantitative analysis were be aggregated at the group level, such as impacts by career stage. Any identifying information in open-ended responses is removed prior to analysis and publication.
To protect the validity of the survey responses, the following settings were turned on in the Qualtrics survey system: Bot Detection (Recaptcha); Post-survey: Prevent multiple submissions with Duplicate Detection; Security scan monitor. Prevent security scanners from accidentally starting surveys when they test your link (reCAPTCHA); Prevent indexing. Block search engines from including your survey in their search results.
The survey was distributed by societies directly to their members via email. Societies and members were instructed not to share the survey link publicly. The responses were filtered for analysis in the following manner:
Recaptcha scores were filtered to be greater than 0.5 as recommended by https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-checker/fraud-detection/
filtered out responses with less than 30% completion (just answering society, career stage, and state question)
filtered out if the system marked it as a duplicate
For the first round of the survey, a response was filtered out if they respondent said they took the survey more than once