Annals of Internal Medicine announces policy on research reproducibility
The editors of the Annals of Internal Medicine announce a new policy on reproducibility of research findings in the current (20 March) issue of the journal. From the summary:
"A community of scientists arrives at the truth by independently verifying new observations. In this time-honored process, journals serve 2 principal functions: evaluative and editorial. In their evaluative function, they winnow out research that is unlikely to stand up to independent verification; this task is accomplished by peer review. In their editorial function, they try to ensure transparent (by which we mean clear, complete, and unambiguous) and objective descriptions of the research. Both the evaluative and editorial functions go largely unnoticed by the public—the former only draws public attention when a journal publishes fraudulent research."
The article goes on to discuss the existing strategies used by the journal to guard against publication of invalid or biased research, and announces new policies to increase confidence in published research. "Every original research article will include a statement that indicates whether the study protocol, data, or statistical code is available to readers and under what terms authors will share this information. Sharing will not be mandatory, but we will require authors to state whether they are willing to share the protocol, data, or statistical code."
The Nature journals' policy on availablity of materials is described at our Author and Referees' website.