Title: The Resource Identification Initiative: A cultural shift in publishing

Abstract

A central tenet in support of research reproducibility is the ability to uniquely identify research resources, i.e., reagents, tools, and materials that are used to perform experiments. However, current reporting practices for research resources are insufficient to allow humans and algorithms to identify the exact resources that are reported or answer basic questions such as “What other studies used resource X?” To address this issue, the Resource Identification Initiative was launched as a pilot project to improve the reporting standards for research resources in the methods sections of papers and thereby improve identifiability and reproducibility. The pilot engaged over 25 biomedical journal editors from most major publishers, as well as scientists and funding officials. Authors were asked to include Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) in their manuscripts prior to publication for three resource types: antibodies, model organisms, and tools (including software and databases). RRIDs represent accession numbers assigned by an authoritative database, e.g., the model organism databases, for each type of resource. To make it easier for authors to obtain RRIDs, resources were aggregated from the appropriate databases and their RRIDs made available in a central web portal (www.scicrunch.org/resources). RRIDs meet three key criteria: they are machine readable, free to generatemore » and access, and are consistent across publishers and journals. The pilot was launched in February of 2014 and over 300 papers have appeared that report RRIDs. The number of journals participating has expanded from the original 25 to more than 40. Here, we present an overview of the pilot project and its outcomes to date. We show that authors are generally accurate in performing the task of identifying resources and supportive of the goals of the project. We also show that identifiability of the resources pre- and post-pilot showed a dramatic improvement for all three resource types, suggesting that the project has had a significant impact on reproducibility relating to research resources.« less

Authors:

Bandrowski, Anita ^[1]; Brush, Matthew ^[2]; Grethe, Jeffery S. ^[1]; Haendel, Melissa A. ^[2]; Kennedy, David N. ^[3]; Hill, Sean ^[4]; Hof, Patrick R. ^[5]; Martone, Maryann E. ^[1]; Pols, Maaike ^[6]; Tan, Serena ^[7]; Washington, Nicole ^[8]; Zudilova-Seinstra, Elena ^[9]; Vasilevsky, Nicole ^[2]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Univ. of California, Lo Jolla, CA (United States). Center for Research in Biological Systems
2. Oregon Health and Science Univ., Portland, OR (United States). Dept. of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology
3. Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA (United States)
4. Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm (Sweden)
5. Leon and Norma Hess Center for Science and Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY (United States)
6. Scientific Outreach, Faculty of 1000 Ltd, London (United Kingdom)
7. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ (United States)
8. Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (United States)
9. Elsevier, Amsterdam (Netherlands)

Publication Date:

Fri May 29 00:00:00 EDT 2015

Research Org.:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE

Contributing Org.:

Resource Identification Initiative Members are listed here: https://www.force11.org/node/4463/members

OSTI Identifier:

1209491

Grant/Contract Number:  

AC02-05CH11231

Resource Type:

Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:

F1000Research

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Volume: 4; Journal Issue: 134; Journal ID: ISSN 2046-1402

Publisher:

F1000Research

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION; 59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES