One year after the Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) issued its Reproducibility2020 challenge and action plan for the biomedical research community, the organization reports encouraging progress toward the goal to significantly improve the quality of preclinical biological research by year 2020. "Reproducibility2020 Report: Progress and Priorities," posted today on bioRxiv, identifies action and impact that has been achieved by the life science research community and outlines priorities going forward. The report is the first comprehensive review of the steps being taken to improve reproducibility since the issue became more widely known in 2012.

The concept of reproducibility is one of the foundations of scientific practice and the bedrock by which scientific validity can be established. However, the extent to which reproducibility is being achieved in the sciences is currently under question. Several studies have shown that much peer-reviewed scientific literature is not reproducible. One crucial contributor to the obstruction of reproducibility is the lack of transparency of original data and methods. Reproducibility, the ability of scientific results and conclusions to be independently replicated by independent parties, potentially using different tools and approaches, can only be achieved if data and methods are fully disclosed.

Researchers from the UW’s eScience Institute, New York University Center for Data Science and Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) have authored a new book titled The Practice of Reproducible Research. Representatives from the three universities, all Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments partners, joined on January 27, 2017, at a symposium hosted by BIDS. There, speakers discussed the book’s content, including case studies, lessons learned and the potential future of reproducible research practices.

JoVE, the leading creator and publisher of video solutions that increase productivity in scientific research and education, today announced 2017 plans to mark the Company’s 10th anniversary. This year-long initiative will include the introduction of new Engineering and the Physical Sciences Collections within JoVE Science Education. JoVE will launch ten major initiatives, including a new JoVE Unlimited pricing formula, enhanced web experience, and establish a number of grants to advance scientific research and education.

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology launched in 2013 as an ambitious effort to scrutinize key findings in 50 cancer papers published in Nature, Science, Cell and other high-impact journals. It aims to determine what fraction of influential cancer biology studies are probably sound — a pressing question for the field. In 2012, researchers at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, announced that they had failed to replicate 47 of 53 landmark cancer papers2. That was widely reported, but Amgen has not identified the studies involved.

Somewhere between 65 and 90 per cent of biomedical literature is considered non-reproducible. This means that if you try to reproduce an experiment described in a given paper, 65 to 90 per cent of the time you won't get the same findings. We call this the reproducibility crisis. The issue became live thanks to a study by Glenn Begley, who ran the oncology department at Amgen, a pharmaceutical company. In 2011, Begley decided to try to reproduce findings in 53 foundational papers in oncology: highly cited papers published in the top journals. He was unable to reproduce 47 of them - 89 per cent.