Bandrowski Anita, Brush Matthew, Grethe Jeffery S, Haendel Melissa A, Kennedy David N, Hill Sean, Hof Patrick R, Martone Maryann E, Pols Maaike, Tan Serena C, Washington Nicole, Zudilova-Seinstra Elena, Vasilevsky Nicole
Center for Research in Biological Systems, UCSD, La Jolla, California, USA.
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Library, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, Portland, Oregon, USA.
J Comp Neurol. 2016 Jan 1;524(1):8-22. doi: 10.1002/cne.23913.
A central tenet in support of research reproducibility is the ability to uniquely identify research resources, i.e., reagents, tools, and materials that are used to perform experiments. However, current reporting practices for research resources are insufficient to identify the exact resources that are reported or to answer basic questions such as "How did other studies use resource X?" To address this issue, the Resource Identification Initiative was launched as a pilot project to improve the reporting standards for research resources in the Methods sections of articles and thereby improve identifiability and scientific reproducibility. The pilot engaged over 25 biomedical journal editors from most major publishers, as well as scientists and funding officials. Authors were asked to include Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) in their articles prior to publication for three resource types: antibodies, model organisms, and tools (i.e., software and databases). RRIDs are assigned by an authoritative database, for example, a model organism database for each type of resource. To make it easier for authors to obtain RRIDs, resources were aggregated from the appropriate databases and their RRIDs made available in a central Web portal (http://scicrunch.org/resources). RRIDs meet three key criteria: they are machine-readable, free to generate and access, and are consistent across publishers and journals. The pilot was launched in February of 2014 and over 300 articles have appeared that report RRIDs. The number of journals participating has expanded from the original 25 to more than 40, with RRIDs appearing in 62 different journals to date. Here we present an overview of the pilot project and its outcomes to date. We show that authors are able to identify resources and are supportive of the goals of the project. Identifiability of the resources post-pilot showed a dramatic improvement for all three resource types, suggesting that the project has had a significant impact on identifiability of research resources.
支持研究可重复性的一个核心原则是能够唯一识别研究资源，即用于进行实验的试剂、工具和材料。然而，目前研究资源的报告做法不足以识别所报告的确切资源，也无法回答诸如“其他研究如何使用资源X？”等基本问题。为了解决这个问题，资源识别倡议作为一个试点项目启动，以提高文章方法部分中研究资源的报告标准，从而提高可识别性和科学可重复性。该试点项目吸引了来自大多数主要出版商的25位以上生物医学期刊编辑以及科学家和资助官员。要求作者在文章发表前为三种资源类型（抗体、模式生物和工具，即软件和数据库）包含研究资源标识符（RRID）。RRID由一个权威数据库分配，例如，针对每种资源类型的模式生物数据库。为了使作者更容易获得RRID，从适当的数据库中汇总资源，并在一个中央门户网站（http://scicrunch.org/resources）上提供它们的RRID。RRID满足三个关键标准：它们是机器可读的、免费生成和访问的，并且在出版商和期刊之间是一致的。该试点项目于2014年2月启动，已有300多篇文章报告了RRID。参与的期刊数量已从最初的25种增加到40多种，迄今为止，RRID出现在62种不同的期刊中。在这里，我们概述了该试点项目及其迄今为止的成果。我们表明，作者能够识别资源，并支持该项目的目标。试点后，所有三种资源类型的资源可识别性都有了显著提高，这表明该项目对研究资源的可识别性产生了重大影响。
