Norwich, United Kingdom
March 3, 2015
Under the auspices of the European bioinformatics consortium AllBio, a training workshop on open science and reproducibility best practice at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) in Norwich, UK, has resulted in the first open science peer review oath being published to help facilitate the open–access of research findings to allow for greater societal impact in science.
Due to the increasing complexities of specialist research, coupled with the rise in new technologies and techniques, scientists, worldwide, are faced with the ongoing challenge of reproducing research findings.
Reproducibility is fundamental to the scientific method so that scientists can replicate experiments and corroborate results from established research to help build on and progress their own projects. In order for research to be reproducible, scientific methods need to be presented in a succinct and consistently clear manner.
As part of the AllBio: Open Science & Reproducibility Best Practice Workshop at TGAC the workshop attendees have produced a peer-review oath and accompanying manifesto to increase the transparency of the scientific method and reproducibility of research results.
Designed to offer guidelines to enable reviewers, with minimum friction or bias, to follow and apply open science principles, and support the ideas of transparency, reproducibility; and ultimately greater societal impact, with further research projects being recognised in the public domain.
Peer review is the lynchpin of the publishing system, encouraging the scientific community to uphold these principles to improve published papers, increase confidence in the reproducibility of the research and, therefore, provide strategic benefits to authors and their Institutions. Introducing the oath and manifesto at the stage of peer review will ensure that the research being published includes everything that their fellow researchers would need to allow for successful duplication.
“Open peer review is gaining momentum within the scientific research community as a powerful way of bringing transparency, honesty and collaborative discussion to the review process. The oath developed at the AllBio meeting builds on previous work to attempt to deliver a more comprehensive yet concise framework of key points that reviewers can use to show their dedication to open peer review and promote open science," said Robert Davey, Data Infrastructure & Algorithms Group Leader at TGAC and co-author.
Michael Markie, Associate Publisher at F1000Research and co-author, added: “The workshop itself enabled a like-minded mix of researchers, publishers and open science enthusiasts to come together in one place, which definitely helped produce a solid, tangible output from our discussions. It’s great that we have managed to publish our ideas which have been well received by the scientific community thus far.”
Vicky Schneider, Head of 361° Division at TGAC and co-author, said: “It’s great to see the passion and commitment from the community for open science, and how then and there during the workshop we started on getting the first draft of this paper ready. I am thrilled TGAC and AllBio enabled this to happen and look forward to other events and initiatives of this kind to take place here with our world-class collaborators.”
An Open Science Peer Review Oath is published by F1000Research.