In his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discusses how and why media outlets so often report untrue or incomplete information as science.

The aim of this study was to assess the reproducibility and validity of a non-quantitative 28-item food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Children aged 9–10 years (n = 50) from three schools in Dunedin, New Zealand, completed the FFQ twice and a four-day estimated food diary (4DEFD) over a two-week period. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and Spearman’s correlation coefficients (SCC) were used to determine reproducibility and validity of the FFQ, respectively.

Kyle Cranmer, a faculty member in NYU's physics department, distills and describes of the event of NYU's first Reproducibility Symposium on May 3, 2016.

This Workshop aims at becoming a forum to discuss ideas and advancements towards the revision of current scientific communication practices in order to support Open Science, introduce novel evaluation schemes, and enable reproducibility. As such it candidates as an event fostering collaboration between (i) Library and information scientists working on the identification of new publication paradigms; (ii) ICT scientists involved in the definition of new technical solutions to these issues; (iii) scientists/researchers who actually conduct the research and demand tools and practices for Open Science. The expected results are advancements in the definition of the next generation scientific communication ecosystem, where scientists can publish research results (including the scientific article, the data, the methods, and any “alternative” product that may be relevant to the conducted research) in order to enable reproducibility (effective reuse and decrease of cost of science) and rely on novel scientific reward practices.

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).

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.