Concern over the reliability of published biomedical results grows unabated. Frustration with this 'reproducibility crisis' is felt by everyone pursuing new disease treatments: from clinicians and would-be drug developers who want solid foundations for the preclinical research they build on, to basic scientists who are forced to devote more time and resources to newly imposed requirements for rigour, reporting and statistics. Tightening rigour across all experiments will decrease the number of false positive findings, but comes with the risk of reducing experimental efficiency and creativity. Bolder ideas are needed. What is being proposed here is a compromise between the need to trust conclusions in published papers and the freedom for basic scientists to explore and innovate.
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