The Reproducibility Initiative, supported by Mendeley data, gets $1.3M to replicate key findings in cancer biology. – Mendeley Blog

"The Reproducibility Initiative, a project we’ve written about before, has reached a major milestone. They have been awarded $1.3M in funding from the Center for Open Science and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to replicate 50 key findings in cancer biology. Mendeley has supported the initiative by helping to design the selection process for papers, using Mendeley readership in addition to traditional citation measures.

We try to keep ahead of the issues in research, pushing for open access and better tools for researchers, and over the past few years, from the Stapel affair in psychology to the reports from Bayer and Amgen reports of their failures to replicate most of the high-impact biomedical research they have studied in-house, reproducibility has emerged as a key issue. This comes as no surprise to us, and in fact, John Ioannidis’ paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” has been one of the all-time most highly read papers on Mendeley.

So we’re super excited for the Reproducibility Initiative and for the change this can bring to research, and I’m personally proud of my work to support the Initiative. I’m also stoked that Mendeley readership data has become good enough quality to be used in a project of this caliber. There have been some criticisms of the project, with folks saying that some research is inherently not reproducible and that 50 studies is just a drop in the bucket, which is all true, but the Initiative will be working closely with the authors of the selected papers (full list to be released soon), focusing on the most high impact, hypothesis-driven work, and using independent third-party expert labs to do the work, so if they can’t replicate the findings, there’s a good chance no one else will be able to either. The data derived from these and any future replications will be analyzed with a view towards finding ways to surface the most robust work. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a little recognition for taking the time to do careful and reproducible work?..."