As a rule scientific topics don’t make it into the popular press unless they are extremely controversial or widely accepted.  In some rare cases the topic can be both.  Take the issue of scientific reproducibility; while this issue has always been a well-known thorn in the scientific communities’ side it has now reached the level where it is getting attention outside of the research community.

In October 2013 the magazine The Economist published an article titled “Trouble at the lab” that outlined some of the major issues facing researchers trying to reproduce other’s results.  The article outlines several issues the author feels play a role in this problem: from a lack of basic statistics to author biases to outright fraud.

While there are many underlying reasons for why it can be difficult to reproduce some results there is one area that can be (and is currently being) addressed: the identification of resources used in experiments.  In a recent article in the online journal PeerJ Vasilevsky et. al. examined approximately 200 primary research articles in a wide range of disciplines to determine if it is possible to positively identify the specific “resources” (i.e. reagents, model organisms, cell constructs, etc.) used.  Their results showed that 54% of the time it was not possible to identify a specific resource.

To address this lack of clarity the Resource Identification Initiative (RII) has been launched.  The RII is a collaborative effort between publishers, research groups, funding agencies and commercial entities whose goal is to “improve resource visibility in science”.

In a recent blog post on Scrazzl, Anita Bandrowski, project lead for the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), the lead organizer behind RII, discusses some background of the RII and its goals and objectives.  The RII has launched its pilot program as of Nov 9, 2013 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.  The immediate goals include:

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1.  Getting researchers to begin using a citation tool that has been developed to create machine-readable tags for resources like antibodies, organisms and software.

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2. Encouraging the research community to put pressure on publishers to improve reporting in the methods sections of papers.

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3. Also to encourage researchers to get tool manufacturers to create and maintain unique identifiers for the products they sell.

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4. Spread the word about this initiative using #RII and #reproducibility.

Making science more reproducible will take buy in from many different participants; the RII is a first step in this process.