Video can make science more open, transparent, robust, and reproducible

Amidst the recent flood of concerns about transparency and reproducibility in the behavioral and clinical sciences, we suggest a simple, inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and uniquely powerful tool to improve the reproducibility of scientific research and accelerate progress—video recordings of experimental procedures. Widespread use of video for documenting procedures could make moot disagreements about whether empirical replications truly reproduced the original experimental conditions. We call on researchers, funders, and journals to make commonplace the collection and open sharing of video-recorded procedures.

Need to find a replication partner, or collaborator? There’s an online platform for that

Do researchers need a new "Craigslist?" We were recently alerted to a new online platform called StudySwap by one of its creators, who said it was partially inspired by one of our posts. The platform creates an "online marketplace" that previous researchers have called for, connecting scientists with willing partners – such as a team looking for someone to replicate its results, and vice versa. As co-creators Christopher Chartier at Ashland University and Randy McCarthy at Northern Illinois University tell us, having a place where researchers can find each other more efficiently "is in everyone’s best interest."

Ethical and legal implications of the methodological crisis in neuroimaging

Currently, many scientific fields such as psychology or biomedicine face a methodological crisis concerning the reproducibility, replicability and validity of their research. In neuroimaging, similar methodological concerns have taken hold of the field and researchers are working frantically towards finding solutions for the methodological problems specific to neuroimaging. This paper examines some ethical and legal implications of this methodological crisis in neuroimaging. With respect to ethical challenges, the paper discusses the impact of flawed methods in neuroimaging research in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, particulyrly with respect to faulty brain-based models of human cognition, behavior and personality. Specifically examined is whether such faulty models, when they are applied to neurological or psychiatric diseases, could put patients at risk and whether this places special obligations upon researchers using neuroimaging. In the legal domain, the actual use of neuroimaging as evidence in U.S. courtrooms is surveyed, followed by an examination of ways the methodological problems may create challenges for the criminal justice system. Finally, the paper reviews and promotes some promising ideas and initiatives from within the neuroimaging community for addressing the methodological problems.

Developing Standards for Data Citation and Attribution for Reproducible Research in Linguistics

While linguists have always relied on language data, they have not always facilitated access to those data. Linguistic publications typically include short excerpts from data sets, ordinarily consisting of fewer than five words, and often without citation. Where citations are provided, the connection to the data set is usually only vaguely identified. An excerpt might be given a citation which refers to the name of the text from which it was extracted, but in practice the reader has no way to access that text. That is, in spite of the potential generated by recent shifts in the field, a great deal of linguistic research created today is not reproducible, either in principle or in practice. The workshops and panel presentation will facilitate development of standards for the curation and citation of linguistics data that are responsive to these changing conditions and shift the field of linguistics toward a more scientific, data-driven model which results in reproducible research.

Open for Comments: Linguistics Data Interest Group Charter Statement

Data are fundamental to the field of linguistics. Examples drawn from natural languages provide a foundation for claims about the nature of human language, and validation of these linguistic claims relies crucially on these supporting data. Yet, while linguists have always relied on language data, they have not always facilitated access to those data. Publications typically include only short excerpts from data sets, and where citations are provided, the connections to the data sets are usually only vaguely identified. At the same time, the field of linguistics has generally viewed the value of data without accompanying analysis with some degree of skepticism, and thus linguists have murky benchmarks for evaluating the creation, curation, and sharing of data sets in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.This disconnect between linguistics publications and their supporting data results in much linguistic research being unreproducible, either in principle or in practice. Without reproducibility, linguistic claims cannot be readily validated or tested, rendering their scientific value moot. In order to facilitate the development of reproducible research in linguistics, The Linguistics Data Interest Group plans to develop the discipline-wide adoption of common standards for data citation and attribution. In our parlance citation refers to the practice of identifying the source of linguistic data, and attribution refers to mechanisms for assessing the intellectual and academic value of data citations.

Structuring supplemental materials in support of reproducibility

Supplements are increasingly important to the scientific record, particularly in genomics. However, they are often underutilized. Optimally, supplements should make results findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (i.e., “FAIR”). Moreover, properly off-loading to them the data and detail in a paper could make the main text more readable. We propose a hierarchical organization for supplements, with some parts paralleling and “shadowing” the main text and other elements branching off from it, and we suggest a specific formatting to make this structure explicit. Furthermore, sections of the supplement could be presented in multiple scientific “dialects”, including machine-readable and lay-friendly formats.