The following email blast was sent by NIDA (3/4/2016) to current and former grantees, encompassing much of the neuroscience scientific community in the US. This shows that individual institutes, in addition to the office of the director at the National Institutes of Health, seem to be moving forward to improve scientific reproducibility, as their director described at length in several blogs and papers in the last few years with possibly the most interesting blog here:https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2013/09/improving-reproducibility-transparency-in-biomedical-research

What is new?

NIDA, a leader in the reproducibility debate, is taking another in a set of very concrete steps asking authors / grantees to improve reporting of the reagents used to produce studies funded by NIDA. The reagent list is the simplest portion of a study to reproduce and going with SciCrunch and its' aggregate set of reagents means that the list of reagents referenced in each study will be backed up by database entries and the potential exists for salient information to be brought to the reader's attention such as the material data sheet, comments, reviews or the status of the reagent (is it discontinued?) long after the paper is published.

This support from an institute, should help journals on the front lines of implementing a new standard, and with favorable winds it is likely that reporting of reagents will undergo a rapid transformation for the better in the coming years. 

The good work over the last several years of the Force11 Resource Identification Initiative group is being acknowledged. 

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NIDA Neuroscience Update, March 4, 2016

SciCrunch:  A resource for Enhancing Reproducibility Through Rigor and Transparency

In October 2015, NIH and AHRQ introduced new requirements for rigor and transparency for most research grant and individual mentored career development award applications (see NOT-OD-16-004, NOT-OD-16-011 and NOT-OD-16-012).

The first step in reproducible methods is authentication of key biological and/or chemical reagents.   

NIH supports reproducible methods especially reagents, and would like you to know that there is a tool that can help with compliance for your next paper, just go to scicrunch.org/resources 

The RRID, Research Resource IDentifier, is a stable and unique archival identifier for antibodies, organisms and software tools. Adding the RRID will substantially improve the list of materials such that looking for the right mouse or antibody will become much easier, appropriate databases will maintain the entry even when reagents are discontinued at commercial vendors. 

The process is easy: 0. write a methods section, 1. go to scicrunch.org/resources, 2. find your reagents/tools, 3. copy the "cite this" text into your methods, 4. publish your next paper.

These RRIDs are now recommended by Neuron (cell.com/neuron/rrid), the Journal of Comparative Neurology and many others, and look like this: 

     Antibody: Millipore Cat#MAB377, RRID:AB_2298772

     Rat: RRID:RGD_737903

     Software tool: ImageJ, v10, RRID:nif-0000-30467

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