In my previous post on Assessing Credibility in Scientific Research, I described several ways that credibility might be tracked with respect to a paper and the methods and materials used. William Gunn at Mendeley, recently pointed me to a project that he’s become involved in, called the Reproducibility Initiative.
The aim of the Reproducibility Initiative is to identify and reward high quality reproducible research via independent validation of key experimental results.
The founding partners in the initiative include Science Exchange, PLoS, figshare and Mendeley. Science Exchange is responsible for identifying potential collaborators willing to validate a particular piece of research. Figshare provides a means of openly sharing the resultant data. Validation experiments can then be published, and the original research can be branded with an “Independently Validated” badge.
The Reproducibility Initiative has a Cancer Biology project dedicated to investigating the top 50 papers in the discipline. There’s also an Antibody Validation Project to help researchers identify high quality antibodies.