Reproducibility Initiative gets $1.3M grant to validate 50 cancer studies

Reproducibility in science is something that badly needs this push. It&#x27;s an incredibly difficult &quot;sell&quot; to anyone with funds for research, and I&#x27;m extremely happy that they&#x27;ve found capital for it.<p>The foundations of our scientific knowledge need to be solidified, and from all the science news and developments, this one is the one that makes me by far the most excited for the future of science.<p>Next on the list, open source repositories for protocols of experiments! Maybe someone surprises me with a link to an existing solution :).

Honestly, I&#x27;m impressed $1.3M is enough for 50 studies! Though, of course, verification should be cheaper than the original research since you know exactly what to look for and how to find it.

Science Exchange is leading and pushing ahead with this very important work. They are addressing what the public funders and private industry can&#x27;t and won&#x27;t do, but at scale this becomes really powerful. Great stuff.

I&#x27;d be interested to know <i>which</i> studies they are targeting. Is SciEx testing a key figure from an expansive publication, or the entire methodology from discoveries with few tests? To me, this seems to be a conceptually difficult decision to make...most discoveries do not discuss the number of years (or failed attempts) that goes by before obtaining the quantifiable result.<p>And where is the peer review in this process? I suppose as soon as something turns up unreproducible we will find out.

I don&#x27;t know very much about how reproducibility validation works. Is it the case that, if we assume p= ~0.05 and all 50 original studies are perfect, we would expect the first iteration of reproducibility validation to fail for ~2 of the 50 studies?

This is awesome. I met some of the people behind The Center For Open Science at SciPy this year. They seemed very passionate. I hope the idea of reproducing experiments as a matter of course becomes more common. Maybe in the future to be a reputable scientist you will have had to reproduce many of the current experiments of the time.

this is really phenomenal. Congratulations, SE.

Congratulations SciEx !

awesome congrats guys!