Title is "How to make biomedical research more reproducible"' discussed by a psychologist.
Funding via R01 et al creates an ecosystem of start-up like labs that publish or perish as is said--and perish quickly. For too many PIs feeling crunched by grants running low, skepticism towards borderline results could be a lab killer and so they take the position that their hypotheses are right until proven wrong. Because journals are filled with irreproducible nonsense, scientists seem less and less like the high priests of reality that we want them to be and more like the rest of the world struggling to get by and skirting the edge of honesty as they do so. However, the multiplicity of scrappy labs may be a good model to explore the multiplicity of biological phenomena and time will reveal the winners from the losers, even if a moutain of garbage papers is produced in the meantime.
On a pedantic note, because I can't resist-- biomedical research might be mildly more reproducible if psychology journals, which are notoriously bad on reproducibility, were not considered part of biomedicine.
>"In April, a group of influential UK biomedical funding agencies held a meeting to discuss the problem — and have just released their findings."
I checked, there is no data there. The findings are just a summary of whatever they discussed. I am quite interested (pessimistically) to find out what a biomed reproducibility project will uncover.
>"There were scientists talking about the ‘reproducibility police’ or even ‘reproducibility Nazis’."
Funding via R01 et al creates an ecosystem of start-up like labs that publish or perish as is said--and perish quickly. For too many PIs feeling crunched by grants running low, skepticism towards borderline results could be a lab killer and so they take the position that their hypotheses are right until proven wrong. Because journals are filled with irreproducible nonsense, scientists seem less and less like the high priests of reality that we want them to be and more like the rest of the world struggling to get by and skirting the edge of honesty as they do so. However, the multiplicity of scrappy labs may be a good model to explore the multiplicity of biological phenomena and time will reveal the winners from the losers, even if a moutain of garbage papers is produced in the meantime.
On a pedantic note, because I can't resist-- biomedical research might be mildly more reproducible if psychology journals, which are notoriously bad on reproducibility, were not considered part of biomedicine.