To evaluate the reproducibility of indices of lung microstructure and function derived from 129 Xe chemical shift saturation recovery (CSSR) spectroscopy in healthy volunteers and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and to study the sensitivity of CSSR-derived parameters to pulse sequence design and lung inflation level.

Nearly one-third of junior scientists spend no time validating antibodies, even though accurate results depend on these reagents working as expected, according to the results of a survey reported today in BioTechniques. "This is quite alarming," says Matthias Uhlén, a protein researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm who heads an international working group on antibody validation, but who was not directly involved in the survey.

In recent years, there’s been increasing awareness of a problem across many scientific fields—the problem of reproducibility. Can experiments be repeated (or "reproduced") to arrive at the same result? Evidence is piling up that the answer, all too often, is no. This makes it difficult to know which results we can confidently rely on, and which are spurious.

"It is entirely within the realm of possibility that the creation of a new publishing platform, focused on hosting formal replications, alongside these review style evaluations of method, would provide a new and more focused home for the type of discussion. Overall, implementing such a system would vastly improve the accessibility of research; both through providing links to peer reviewed replications which have not been filtered by the file drawer, and literally, in terms enabling an overview replication information out at a glance."

Reproducibility material (data and code) for 'Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People’s Party', Scandinavian Political Studies.

A new version of ReproZip has been released, adding some bugfixes and new commands related to distributed or server experiments.