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We are delighted to announce that we have just become an affiliate member of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) Stakeholder Engagement Group. Michael Markie, Publishing Director at F1000, discusses how joining the stakeholder group helps us to improve our standards for reproducible research and the steps we’re taking to improve the robustness of the research we publish.

We are delighted to announce that we have just become an affiliate member of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) Stakeholder Engagement Group.

The UKRN is peer-led consortium of academic researchers working together to champion robust and reproducible research at institutions across the country through local networks of researchers at all career stages. Its goals are to investigate the factors that contribute to robust research, promote training activities, and disseminate best practice – working with stakeholders to ensure coordination of efforts across the sector.

By joining the stakeholder group, F1000Research will support the work of the UKRN and aim to uphold their standards for reproducible research, which will lay the foundations for us to encourage better research and transparency in research methods. Importantly, it will also help us to understand what the community’s needs are with regards to reproducibility and enable us to do what we do best; piloting and innovating ways to ensure publications on F1000Research are of the highest standard and fully reproducible.

Professor Marcus Munafó, head of the UKRN Steering Group said, “I’m delighted that F1000 has joined the rapidly-growing group of stakeholders that we are working with to ensure that the UK leads the world in conducting and promoting rigorous research. Together with the institutions that are joining UKRN and our grass-roots networks of researchers at all career stages, there is a real opportunity to collaboratively shape the future research landscape.”

This new collaboration with UKRN is just one of many initiatives we’ve embarked upon over the past few years. We’ve dedicating ourselves to innovating, collaborating and working with like-minded groups to try and improve the robustness of the research we publish.

Our philosophy is that transparency in reporting and the deposition of underlying data is how all research should be published. By applying this philosophy, we let researchers fully analyse and reuse data which gives them the best opportunity to reproduce results and ultimately build upon findings. If the original datasets are not available for review, other researchers must assume that the data were collected and the analyses done correctly, and that the stated results and conclusions therefore are correct – but as we all know that’s just not how it works!

Going forward we will continue to work with the community on trying to improve how we make everything we publish as robust and reproducible as we can, and I’m sure being affiliated with the UKRN will help us continue to learn and be inspired to progress even more.