Resource Identification Guidelines - now at Elsevier

The problem of reproducibility of results has been addressed by many groups, as being due to scientists having very large data sets and highlighting the interesting, yet most likely statistically anomalous findings and other science no-no's like reporting only positive results.

Our group, has been working to make the methods and reagents reporting better and I am happy to report that this group has been seeing resonance of these ideas.

In a group sponsored by FORCE11, a group of researchers, reagent vendors and publishers has been meeting to discuss how to best accomplish better reporting in all of the literature and both the NIH and publishers themselves are now becoming interested in their sucess. The latest and greatest evidence of this can be found on the Elsevier website, as a guideline to authors, however this will soon be followed by a pilot project to be launched at the Society for Neuroscience meeting with over 25 journals and most major publishers.

Of course there is no reason to wait for an editor to ask to put in catalog numbers or stock numbers for transgenic animals. These should be things that we are trained to do in graduate school as good practices for reporting our findings.

We seem to be getting ready to change (or change back) to a more rigorous methods reporting, which should strengthen the recently eroded credibility of the scientific enterprise. I for one, hope that the message that will be communicated is: "scientists don't hide problems, even endemic ones, we examine them and find workable solutions".