The University of Minnesota Libraries addressed this issue head-on this year by launching the reproducibility portal in an effort to help faculty and others on campus improve their research practices. The portal is a collaboration that includes Liberal Arts Technology and Information Services (LATIS) and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI).

Not a week passes without reproducibility in science – or the lack of it – hitting the headlines. Although much of the criticism is directed at the biomedical sciences or psychology, many of the same problems also pervade the chemical sciences.

Reproducibility is the idea that an experiment can be repeated by another scientist and they will get the same result. It is important to show that the claims of any experiment are true and for them to be useful for any further research. However, science appears to have an issue with reproducibility. A survey by Nature revealed that 52% of researchers believed there was a "significant reproducibility crisis" and 38% said there was a "slight crisis". We asked three experts how they think the situation could be improved.

The theoretical physicists Junior Professor Fabian Pauly and his postdoc Dr. Safa G. Bahoosh now succeeded in a team of experimental physicists and chemists in demonstrating a reliable and reproducible single molecule switch. The basis for this switch is a specifically synthesized molecule with special properties. This is an important step towards realising fundamental ideas of molecular electronics. The results were published in the online journal Nature Communications on 9 March 2017.

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon. From his lab at the University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.

At AAAS 2017, a pair of panel discussions addressed the reproducibility crisis in science, particularly biomedical science, and suggested that it is manageable, provided stakeholders continue to demonstrate a commitment to quality. One panel, led by Leonard P. Freedman, Ph.D., president of Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI), was comprehensive. It prescribed a range of initiatives.