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Today, we are very excited to unveil the Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness channel, a new dedicated venue for life scientists to publish and discuss confirmatory and non-confirmatory research results. We are also delighted to have this new channel championed by former Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine and F1000 International Advisory Board member, Bruce Alberts and Amgen’s Senior Vice President for Research, Sasha Kamb. See the press release.

It’s no secret that reproducibility is an ongoing concern in the life sciences. Experimental results are published that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce by other groups, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish reproducible from irreproducible work. This issue is something F1000Research, Bruce and Sasha feel strongly about; their excellent editorial on the matter is a must read. After much thought about how to challenge the reproducibility issue, we decided that, at its core, the solution needs to be controlled and driven by the scientific community and has to perpetuate a self-regulating culture.

We believe that the key to achieving such a solution is to change how we currently deal with reporting confirming and disconfirming studies and develop a system to help improve the self-correcting nature of science. It’s very reassuring that there has been action by funders to provide Principles and Guidelines for Reporting Preclinical Research and also encouraging to see publishers getting behind initiatives such as the TOP guidelines. However, to tackle the issue head-on, we must also leverage a community effort to underpin the problems that are felt on the ground by practising scientists. The only way to achieve this is through open and transparent publication and discussion; and that’s where F1000Research comes in.

Through our open and transparent publication process, information on why some studies can’t be reproduced in a fair and controlled environment can be efficiently exposed and discussed by scientists without editorial bias. Pre-publication anonymous peer review and editorial gate-keeping of traditional journals combined with the ‘publish or perish’ culture means that it is currently difficult to record important confirming and disconfirming data. The Preclinical Reproducibility and Robustness channel has therefore been set up to make this data available and to enable important findings to be seen.

Any researcher who wants to publish a confirming or non-confirming study is encouraged to submit on condition that they openly provide the full methodology and data to support their claims. All the underlying data will be available for download and reuse from our dedicated page on the Open Science Framework. Each publication will undergo fully transparent invited post-publication peer review following the F1000Research publication model. Referee reports from invited named experts will be posted alongside the article, allowing readers to get a full picture of the soundness of the validation experiments.

It is important to recognise that this channel is not a platform to encourage or enable finger-pointing, or to criticise the original authors for their work; it has been created to facilitate meaningful scientific discourse that is open and publicly accessible. All submissions should be written in a constructive way, and be supported by data that show that the results have been generated in a robust manner.

Amgen have published the first three studies in the channel to get these open discussions started, and to show the type of robust replication studies that are required for the channel. We are now actively seeking other researchers in both academia and industry to contribute their own confirming and disconfirming studies. A key part of progressing science is to build upon the body of work that is already out there; if the reproducibility issue is an obstruction to achieving this then there is an obligation to correct it as quickly as possible. By accelerating the accumulation of knowledge, the wider public stand to benefit, and the translation of basic science into effective clinical interventions and new technological advances that will ultimately have a positive effect society will become a reality sooner rather than later.

The channel is now open for submissions. If you have any questions or would like to be involved in helping this channel to make a real difference then we would love to hear from you.