Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025 Mar 5;12(3):241936.
doi: 10.1098/rsos.241936. eCollection 2025 Mar.

Provide proactive reproducible analysis transparency with every publication

Affiliations

Provide proactive reproducible analysis transparency with every publication

Paul Meijer et al. R Soc Open Sci. .

Abstract

The high incidence of irreproducible research has led to urgent appeals for transparency and equitable practices in open science. For the scientific disciplines that rely on computationally intensive analyses of large datasets, a granular understanding of the analysis methodology is an essential component of reproducibility. This article discusses the guiding principles of a computational reproducibility framework that enables a scientist to proactively generate a complete reproducible trace as analysis unfolds, and share data, methods and executable tools as part of a scientific publication, allowing other researchers to verify results and easily re-execute the steps of the scientific investigation.

Keywords: data analysis; equity in science; immunology; life sciences; open science; reproducibility crisis.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

The full provenance of an analysis.
Figure 1.
The full provenance of an analysis.
An example of subject metadata associated with a dataset.
Figure 2.
An example of subject metadata associated with a dataset.
An example of structural metadata for a transformation step.
Figure 3.
An example of structural metadata for a transformation step.
An example of a partial trace of a set of related processes.
Figure 4.
An example of a partial trace of a set of related processes.

References

    1. Begley CG, Ellis LM. 2012. Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature 483, 531–533. - PubMed
    1. Open Science Collaboration . 2015. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 349. ( 10.1126/science.aac4716) - DOI
    1. Baker M. 2016. 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature. 533, 452–454. ( 10.1038/533452a) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Harris R. 2018. Rigor mortis: how sloppy science creates worthless cures, crushes hope, and wastes billions. New York, NY: Basic Books.
    1. Zhang N, Guo M, Jin C, Xu Z. 2022. Effect of medical researchers’ creative performance on scientific misconduct: a moral psychology perspective. BMC Med. Ethics 23, 137. ( 10.1186/s12910-022-00876-8) - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources