The publisher role in solving the reproducibility crisis

Speakers:

Dr Leslie McIntosh, CEO & Co-founder, Ripeta

Caroline Sutton, Director of Editorial Development, Taylor and Francis

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Head of Data Publishing, Open Research, Springer Nature

Dr Mark Hahnel, CEO & Founder, Figshare

As the gatekeepers of quality in research, publishers have a key role to play in helping to solve the reproducibility (or replication) crisis. For over a decade, we have known that researchers have problems reproducing the results of their peers and in some cases themselves. Thanks to more metascience studies, the scale of the issue is now laid bare.

In a Nature study from 2016 - which surveyed 1,576 researchers on reproducibility in research-90% of respondents acknowledged there was a reproducibility crisis; only 3% said there was not a crisis.

So two years later, what steps can publishers we take to solve the problem?

In the age of “Fake News,” it’s increasingly important that the fundamentals on which we base our scientific thinking are robust, can be explained, and can be repeated. One of the biggest unanswered questions so far is whose job is it to ensure results are repeatable? We’ve seen many publishers announce data sharing policies of varying leniency. Aside from being good scientific practice to share all of your underlying data, there is a hope that these policies will be the first step to solving the reproducibility crisis.

But who can be trusted to give the stamp of reproducibility? Who has the time and resources to repeat every published result? Who pays the bill - so to speak - for resolving this crisis?

The reputation of academic research as a whole will suffer if the reproducibility crisis is not resolved.

Join this webinar panel discussion with leading industry experts. We'll be bringing a variety of different view points from publishers, universities, platform providers and researchers to see how we can tackle this problem together.