Evolving publication platforms: Key takeaways from the Lund Biomedicine ReproducibiliTea Journal Club

At its most recent journal club, Lund Biomedicine Reproducibilitea got to hear guest speaker Isabel Barriuso Ortega, PhD, co-founder of Research Agora, talk about new publishing formats that aim to “make every result count.” Joined by her fellow co-founder, Pablo Hernández Malmierca, PhD, Isabel discussed several platforms for accelerating and simplifying the publication of scientific results, including their innovative “Marbles” model.

These initiatives are intended to address publication bias, reduce research waste, and capture negative results. For example, preregistration, through such avenues as Registered Reports, focuses on the quality of a study, rather than its results, mitigating the potential for publication bias.

In addition, platforms like F1000, Micropublications, and Octopus allow researchers to disseminate bite-sized results and seemingly insignificant and negative findings, instead of amassing years’ and years’ worth of data but ultimately publishing a fraction of the output. Research Agora is taking this idea one step further by offering the opportunity to share “Marbles”—short, peer-reviewed open-access research reports that confirm, expand, or challenge published research.

Although cautious about the ability of these new platforms to gain widespread acceptance, participants were enthusiastic about the idea of lowering the barriers to publishing research results—regardless of their impact—especially for students and scientists in training. Indeed, several attendees bemoaned the many years that were “wasted” trying to replicate poorly executed and reported experiments. Had Marbles or other outlets existed then, perhaps they would have been aware of other groups having similar experiences and avoided the pain of irreproducibility altogether.

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Our upcoming journal club meetings will continue exploring critical research questions. If you are a researcher, student, or science enthusiast, join us to engage in meaningful dialogue about improving scientific methods and research integrity.

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Speaker and guest author

Isabel Barriuso Ortega, PhD, COO and co-founder of Research Agora, a publication platform that fosters a more accessible, transparent, and collaborative research ecosystem.

Editor

Sean Kim, PhD, is a medical writer at AdvanSci Research Solutions. He has been a medical writer since 2006, writing extensively on therapeutics for a wide range of areas.