Boosting the reproducibility of research

Recent years have seen perceptions of a “reproducibility crisis” grow in various disciplines. Scientists see poor levels of reproducibility as a severe threat to scientific self-correction, the efficiency of research processes, and societal trust in research results. A major Horizon Europe-funded project named TIER2 starts this month to study these issues and improve reproducibility across diverse scientific contexts.

University of Oxford’s Lead Investigator Susanna-Assunta Sansone, who is Professor of Data Readiness, and Academic Lead of Research Practice for the University, spoke about the project;

“We are excited to collaborate in this project to enhance trust, integrity, and efficiency in research, through next-level reproducibility”

TIER2’s interdisciplinary, expert project team will use co-creative methods to work with social scientists, life and computer science researchers, research funders and publishers, to further understand and address the causes of poor reproducibility. The project will produce and test new tools, connect initiatives, engage communities, and test novel interventions to increase reuse and overall quality of research results. TIER2 will study reproducibility across diverse contexts by selecting three broad research areas and two cross-disciplinary stakeholder groups. The areas are the social, life, and computer sciences. Meanwhile, the cross-disciplinary stakeholder groups are research funders and publishers.

Data Readiness Group

The Data Readiness Group will contribute to the TIER2 goals via FAIRsharing, a resource and community of stakeholders promoting the value of standards, repositories and policies in support of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR) of data, which underpins reproducibility. FAIRsharing will drive the work with the publishers in particular, to define and test a Reproducibility Checklist.

TIER2 consortium

The interdisciplinary TIER2 consortium comprises ten members from universities and research centers across Europe. They share a long history of successful cooperation and have extensive experience in completed EU projects, especially in the fields of Open Science, Research Integrity, and Science Policy: Know Center (Austria), Athena Research Center (Greece), Amsterdam University Medical Center (Netherlands), Aarhus University (Denmark), Pensoft Publishing (Bulgaria), GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany), OpenAIRE (EU), Charité - University of Medicine Berlin (Geramany), Oxford University (UK), and Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center (Greece).

Keep up to date with TIER2

For more details and to stay tuned with the project, please refer to the TIER2 website, and the full project proposal, recently published via the Open Science journal RIO.