We are pleased to share results from a pilot with 13 journals testing the Materials Design Analysis Reporting (MDAR) checklist, a minimum standards reporting checklist for life sciences. Read more
Early in his graduate career, John Blischak found himself creating figures for his advisor’s grant application. Read more
The 2017 Better Science through Better Data event in London, UK, hosted by Springer Nature and Wellcome, was a full day exposé of emerging open data practices, tools, strategies, and policies. Among the potential benefits of open data are replicability, reproducibility, and reusability. While open data is a relatively new hype, some evidence suggests that open data does indeed increase reproducibility. Read more
It is becoming increasingly clear that the current method of publishing scientific findings does not make the most of the vast amounts of data generated during scientific investigation. The message from the #SciData17 conference, held in London on the 25th of October, was that making data, code and detailed methods openly available will increase reproducibility, decrease redundancy and allow scientific discovery to advance at a faster pace. Funding bodies and journals are taking steps to encourage this kind of open research policy, and the decision to release datasets usually sits with lab heads or PIs, but there is a place for bottom-up change from students and postdocs too. Read more
Naturejobs journalism competition winner Jiska van der Reest … Read more
Funding agencies should not penalize poor performers; instead they should reward good mentorship, says Ahmed Alkhateeb … Read more
It has been shown that research articles receive more citations when they have their underlying data openly linked to them. With this in mind, it’s time to consider not just the ideological reasons for making research data open, but the selfish benefits of openly sharing data that all researchers can (and should) be taking advantage of. Read more
Lorena Barba, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at George Washington University in Washington, DC, has long championed research reproducibility. In January, she traveled to Chile to run a weeklong course on reproducible research computing; the month before, she was awarded a 2016 Leamer-Rosenthal Prize, which celebrates those “working to forward the values of openness and transparency in research.” Here, she talks about flying snakes, “repro-packs,” and copyright. Read more
Speakers at the Publishing Better Science through Better Data (#scidata16) conference addressed these issues and more. Read more
The call for reproducibility has never been stronger in the history of science. Since two major pharmaceutical companies, Amgen and Bayer, reported in 2011/12 that their scientists were unable to replicate 80-90% of the findings in landmark papers, scientific news outlets have caught up on the issue. Their reports have catalyzed conversations among stakeholders (policy makers, funding agencies and scientists) to improve reproducibility in science. Read more
