Championed by Amgen's Senior Vice President for Research, Sasha Kamb, and former Editor-in-Chief of Science and F1000Research International Advisory Board member Bruce Alberts (University of California, San Francisco), the Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness channel is open for everyone to publish and discuss confirmatory or non-confirmatory scientific research results.
In an increasingly competitive global environment for funding and employment, research scientists feel pressured to 'publish or perish'. This heavy burden sees a lack of encouragement to carry out and publish research that tests, confirms or contests preclinical research findings. This means that much follow-on research builds on study data that have not been confirmed or reproduced, and which inevitably results in significant research wastage.
To address the issue of research reproducibility, in mid-2015 the UK's Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS), and leading funding bodies for biological and medical research - the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Wellcome Trust - held a symposium to explore the challenges associated with the reliability and reproducibility of biomedical research in the UK, and opportunities for improvements. According to Dorothy Bishop, Chair of the steering committee for the resulting report, titled Reproducibility and Reliability of Biomedical Research, tackling the reproducibility issue will need a mixture of 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' approaches, but a strong community effort is essential to underpin the problems that are felt on the ground by practising scientists.
Bishop welcomed the new F1000Research platform. The Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness channel will provide an environment for reinforcing the acceptability of being open about the results of researchers who are attempting to assess the robustness of major scientific findings, whether they are confirmatory or not.
Amgen will be the first to publish three studies on the Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness channel, which will encourage global discussion centred on the original research and Amgen's non-confirmatory studies, and accelerate understanding of the underlying science.
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