• Welcome to Phoenix Rising!

    Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.

    To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.

'Nature' editorial on reproducibility - more demanding standards for research

Simon

Senior Member
Messages
3,789
Location
Monmouth, UK
This whole reproducibility thing is really taking off:

Announcement: Reducing our irreproducibility (open access)
Over the past year, Nature has published a string of articles that highlight failures in the reliability and reproducibility of published research (collected and freely available at go.nature.com/huhbyr). The problems arise in laboratories, but journals such as this one compound them when they fail to exert sufficient scrutiny over the results that they publish, and when they do not publish enough information for other researchers to assess results properly.

From next month, Nature and the Nature research journals will introduce editorial measures to address the problem by improving the consistency and quality of reporting in life-sciences articles.

full text
Most of this looks really good, though it's a little worrying that a journal of Nature's standing feels the need to remind reviewers and authors that experiments need to adjust for multiple comparisons, or that data must meet the assumptions of the statistical test being applied (eg normal distribution).

They also encourage a move to open data:
To further increase transparency, we will encourage authors to provide tables of the data behind graphs and figures. This builds on our established data-deposition policy for specific experiments and large data sets. The source data will be made available directly from the figure legend, for easy access.
 

Sean

Senior Member
Messages
7,378
To further increase transparency, we will encourage authors to provide tables of the data behind graphs and figures.

"encourage"?

Should be an absolute obligatory not-even-up-for-debate minimum requirement for all peer review publications. There are no excuses for not publishing all data, and every reason for publishing. Anything less is a perverse joke.
 

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
Transparency, accountability and governance issues were what my unfinished blog was to be about, which should have been finished in March. I may now have to substantially rewrite it, I have lost some of the material. These are issues I consider paramount in changing medicine for the better.
 

Enid

Senior Member
Messages
3,309
Location
UK
Strange - as a non scientist I I always believed transparency the very foundation of scientific enquiry (open) - if not non science.