A NEW JOURNAL ON THE REPRODUCIBILITY OF EXPERIMENTS. I have posted a number of times on the recent efforts to publish more replication studies. As I posted here seven years ago, my brother Elmer has been calling for journals of negative results for many years.
Things continue to move in Elmer’s direction. This Economist article celebrates the launch on February 4 of The Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness Channel, which will be dedicated to the task of replicating and testing the experiments of others (a task which the Economist notes is “found tedious by most academic researchers”). There is a backlog of unpublished replication studies because of the difficulty of getting them published. The new journal will provide an outlet for the “accumulated replications gathering dust in commercial laboratories… and also… stimulate academic scientists to follow suit and provide more”.
The article says that the impetus for the new journal was an attempt by Amgen to reproduce the results of 53 high-profile cancer-research papers; Amgen reproduced only six of the 53 successfully.