Biocompare
Mike Okimoto is a co-founder of CompareNetworks and is responsible for the development and implementation of both editorial and data content for the CN verticals. Since 1999 Mike has been closely involved with the evolution of the CN business model and has helped to develop the overall business strategy for the company. His early efforts were focused on the development of product taxonomies and new products to help CN customers reach their target audiences and marketing goals. In his current role, Mike is tasked with managing day to day operations including media fulfillment and deployment as well as customer reporting.
As a rule scientific topics don’t make it into the popular press unless they are extremely controversial or widely accepted. In some rare cases the topic is both. Take the issue of scientific reproducibility; while this issue has always been a thorn in the scientific community’s side, it has now reached the level where it is getting attention outside the research community.
In October 2013 The Economist published an article titled “Trouble at the lab” which outlined some of the major issues facing researchers who are trying to reproduce others' results. The article outlines several issues the author believes play a role in this problem, from a lack of basic statistics to author biases to outright fraud.
Although there are many underlying reasons for why it can be difficult to reproduce some results there is one area that can be (and currently is being) addressed: the identification of resources used in experiments. In a recent article in the online journal PeerJVasilevsky et. al. examined approximately 200 primary-research articles in a wide range of disciplines to determine if it is possible to positively identify the specific “resources” (i.e. reagents, model organisms, cell constructs, etc.) used. Their results showed that 54% of the time it was not possible to identify a specific resource.
To address this lack of clarity the Resource Identification Initiative (RII) has emerged. The goal of the RII - a collaborative effort among publishers, research groups, funding agencies and commercial entities - is to “improve resource visibility in science”.
In a recent blog post on Scrazzl.com, Anita Bandrowski, project lead for the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), the lead organizer behind RII, discusses some background of the RII and its goals and objectives. The RII launched its pilot program as of November 9, 2013, at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. The immediate goals include:
- Getting researchers to begin using a citation tool that has been developed to create machine-readable tags for resources like antibodies, organisms and software.
- Encouraging the research community to put pressure on publishers to improve reporting in the "methods" sections of papers.
- Encouraging researchers to ask tool manufacturers to create and maintain unique identifiers for the products they sell.
- Spreading the word about this initiative using #RII and #reproducibility.
Making science more reproducible will require buy-in from many different participants; the RII is a first step in the process.