Supporting rigor through reproducibility | JAMIA Open | Oxford Academic

"Community abstracts are now mandatory for accepted submissions to JAMIA Open. Community abstracts support a key goal in dissemination of published work to the stakeholders that have the most to gain– the patients. I acknowledge the challenge for many of us who spend our time writing and communicating to research audiences to write Community Abstracts. However, for our field to have the most impact, we must convey our work to the greater community. Community understanding for our findings and innovations in leveraging informatics approaches to improve health and health care is a crucial first step toward building a foundation for reproducibility. That is, if a patient understands work presented in a publication, they should expect that it can be reproduced for themselves.

Reproducibility is on equal footing with rigor in terms of importance in the pursuit of knowledge. Many funding agencies now require explicit description for how proposed work will not only be rigorous but also reproducible. JAMIA Open has strongly encouraged the availability of any associated data (eg, through Dryad) to support reproducibility. Data that are made available through readily accessible, public repositories supports not only verification studies, but can also form the basis for new studies. Data sets can also be enhanced and curated to provide common “benchmark” datasets for algorithm evaluation.

JAMIA Open was established as a Level 1 Data Availability journal, meaning that authors were encouraged to share their data publicly. We are now shifting to be a Level 2 Data Availability journal, meaning that, in addition to sharing data publicly, each publication must include a Data Availability Statement. Of course, the release of data should only be done where ethically possible and in accordance to relevant laws. A description of the Oxford University Press Data Availability policies can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/authors/preparing_your_manuscript/research-data-policy...."