Reproducibility Initiative

By Benito Campos

The issue of experimental reproducibility is of growing concern to the research community. Crowd-funded or grant-funded projects like the Reproducibility Initiative are re-examining some of the key experiments in different scientific fields. Why should you care? Well, at least for three reasons:

1) Funded with 1.3Mio $ the Reproducibility Initiative will probe the “50 most impactful cancer biology studies published between 2010-2012”. This is relevant to your research!

2) This kind of initiative is only one of many; some are even conducted by pharmaceutical companies. And results are worrisome as many key findings proved to be irreproducible. Again, this should matter to you.

3) Many of these reproducibility projects are being conducted through Science Exchange. This commercial online portal connects researchers to hundreds of labs (both commercial and academic). Let’s say you need to sequence a sample, get a biological experiment done or perform any of the over 1,800 analytical and experimental techniques offered on Science Exchange. You can have qualified staff do it for you – often for a reasonable price - and save precious time. If you have a couple of minutes left today, check out their website. It may save you a lot of time during your career!

Links:

• Reproducibility Project
• Want to read more?
• Don’t forget to check out science exchange