Sigma-Aldrich donates US$50,000 in products to Reproducibility Project
Initiative aims to foster replicable research and accelerate scientific discoveries in cancer biology
US life science company Sigma-Aldrich is making a US$50,000 product donation to the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, a large-scale initiative to replicate key findings from recent discoveries in the field of cancer biology.
The project is a collaboration between the online research marketplace Science Exchange, the non-profit Center for Open Science and the open-access journal eLife. The goal is to identify variables in the current scientific process that affect research outcomes and to promote open practices that have a sustainable impact on research.
In December, Sigma-Aldrich released its 2014 State of Translational Research Survey Report, which found that only 22% of translational researchers had complete success in the last year reproducing other labs' published work. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology aims to set a standard of best practices that maximise reproducibility and facilitate an accurate accumulation of knowledge, enabling potentially important findings to be effectively built upon by the scientific community.
'Sigma-Aldrich is committed to helping the scientific community address a serious issue in academic research,' said Amanda Halford, Vice President of Sigma-Aldrich's Academic Research Business. 'Science that cannot be replicated delays breakthroughs and ultimately affects patient outcomes.'
With support from Sigma-Aldrich, Science Exchange and its supporters hope to achieve this goal by independently replicating key experimental findings from each of the 50 most impactful cancer biology studies published between 2010–2012, according to best practices for replication established by the Center for Open Science and others.
'Science Exchange provides easy access to the world's top scientific service providers. We're proud to leverage our network of experts to rigorously conduct the replication studies for the Reproducibility Project,' said Elizabeth Iorns, co-founder and CEO of Science Exchange. 'In order to ensure the robustness of our replication results, we need our labs to use the highest-quality products. That's why we're excited about our collaboration with Sigma-Aldrich, whose superb products will help us ensure the fidelity and accuracy of our experiments.'
