Posts about popular news (old posts, page 4)

CU-Boulder graduate student wants transparent research practice policy

Inspired by a new movement to improve the transparency and reproducibility of research, graduate student John Lurquin wants the University of Colorado to adopt a campus-wide transparent research policy requiring academics to publish data and information about their experiments. Though reproducibility, or the ability to reproduce the results of an experiment, has always been on the minds of researchers, it's been getting more attention recently, thanks to several studies measuring the reliability of published research, said Lurquin, a doctoral student in the department of psychology and neuroscience and an outgoing student body president.

Unconditional data sharing, plus peer review transparency, is key to research reproducibility

Only mandatory Open Data, not Gold Open Access, will lead to more honest and more reproducible science. Open Science is these days largely about mandatory publishing in Open Access (OA), regardless of the costs to poorer scientists or the universities which already struggle to pay horrendous subscription fees. Meanwhile, publishers openly declare that the so-called Gold (author-pays) OA will be much more expensive than even current subscription rates, yet wealthy western institutions like the Dutch university network VSNU or the German Max Planck Society do not seem troubled by this at all. They seriously expect the publishing oligopoly of Elsevier, SpringerNature and Wiley to lower the costs for Gold OA later on, out of the goodness of their hearts (as this winter’s invitation-only Berlin12 OA conference suggests).

It bears repeating: how scientists are addressing the 'reproducibility problem'

Recent reports in the Washington Post and the Economist, among others, raise the concern that relatively few scientists' experimental findings can be replicated. This is worrying: replicating an experiment is a main foundation of the scientific method. As scientists, we build on knowledge gained and published by others. We develop new experiments and questions based on the knowledge we gain from those published reports. If those papers are valid, our work is supported and knowledge advances. On the other hand, if published research is not actually valid, if it can’t be replicated, it delivers only an incidental finding, not scientific knowledge.