Abstract
Reproducibility-enhancing practices of open access journals in biomedical sciences are investigated. Based on transparency and openness promotion guidelines and relevant reporting requirements by institutions that are in the forefront of advancing reproducibility research, eight standards were used to evaluate 27 biomedical journals to 1) determine the extent to which these journals address reproducibility, 2) identify specific policy themes required, and 3) understand overall infrastructure promoted by the journals to deposit, archive, share, and discover research assets. The results show that almost all the 27 journals required authors to address six of the eight standards when preparing and submitting their research. Two standards that were not frequently addressed are preregistration of the study and preregistration of analysis plans. ‘Data availability' policy is the most recurring theme across all journals. The infrastructure promoted to manage the overall scholarly communication workflow range from data, code, software repositories, protocol registration, to funding registry.
TopBackground
Overall, there is an increasing recognition of the fact that sharing published works in the open Internet is vital for scientific progress. In addition to the established scholarly journals that follow either the Green or Gold model, the OA distribution ecosystem is fast expanding that covers - for example personal websites (e.g., https://chanzuckerberg.com/eoss/).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Results Reproducibility: Obtaining the same results from the conduct of an independent study whose procedures are as closely matched to the original experiment as possible.
Gold Open Access: Open access delivered by journals.
Scholarly Communication: The system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.
Methods Reproducibility: The provision of enough detail about study procedures and data so the same procedures could, in theory or in actuality, be exactly repeated.
Inferential Reproducibility: The drawing of qualitatively similar conclusions from either an independent replication of a study or a reanalysis of the original study.
TOP Guidelines: A suite of tools to guide implementation of better, more transparent research.
Reproducibility: The ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials as were used by the original investigator.
Green Open Access: Open access delivered by repositories.
Open Access: Free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Computational Reproducibility: Obtaining consistent results using the same input data; computational steps, methods, and code; and conditions of analysis.