In recent years, evidence has emerged from disciplines ranging from biology to economics that many scientific studies are not reproducible. This evidence has led to declarations in both the scientific and lay press that science is experiencing a “reproducibility crisis” and that this crisis has significant impacts on both science and society, including misdirected effort, funding, and policy implemented on the basis of irreproducible research. In many cases, academic libraries are the natural organizations to lead efforts to implement recommendations from journals, funders, and societies to improve research reproducibility. In this editorial, we introduce the reproducibility crisis, define reproducibility and replicability, and then discusses how academic libraries can lead institutional support for reproducible research.

One of the top journals in political science makes data-sharing and replication part of the publication process.

Over the past few years, research reproducibility has been increasingly highlighted as a multifaceted challenge across many disciplines. There are socio-cultural obstacles as well as a constantly changing technical landscape that make replicating and reproducing research extremely difficult. Researchers face challenges in reproducing research across different operating systems and different versions of software, to name just a few of the many technical barriers. The prioritization of citation counts and journal prestige has undermined incentives to make research reproducible. While libraries have been building support around research data management and digital scholarship, reproducibility is an emerging area that has yet to be systematically addressed. To respond to this, New York University (NYU) created the position of Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility (RDM & R), a dual appointment between the Center for Data Science (CDS) and the Division of Libraries. This report will outline the role of the RDM & R librarian, paying close attention to the collaboration between the CDS and Libraries to bring reproducible research practices into the norm.

ReproZip is a tool that simplifies the process of creating reproducible experiments from command-line executions, a frequent task in computational science.

It’s not a new story, although “the reproducibility crisis” may seem to be. For life sciences, I think it started in the…