EDUCATIONAL CORNER
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater
December 22, 2023The pressure to replace animal research with non-animal methods is growing. Earlier this year, NIH has issued a “Request for Information…
Read More“Home inspections” for life sciences companies going public before clinical proof of concept
December 22, 2023For over a decade, there is a trend of less specialized investment firms and public equity investors betting on life sciences…
Read More“Publication of negative/null results discussed at NIH”
November 2, 2022NINDS Office of Research Quality has presented a proposal on how to address the publication bias. It can be watched HERE (starts at…
Read More“The customer is king!”
November 2, 2022Once during our vacation in Greece, our children asked for ice cream after having dinner. When the waiter was asked about…
Read More“Hold your horses!”
November 2, 2022Risk of Alzheimer’s disease nearly doubles in older adults with Covid-19! Like many of you, several weeks ago we have also…
Read More“The Steal syndrome – or the FDA Modernization Act to end animal testing requirement passes U.S. Senate”
November 2, 2022On September 29, 2022, the U.S. Senate passed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, S.5002, by unanimous consent. While it is unclear…
Read MoreArchimedes‘ fulcrum and the “reproducibility” debate
June 16, 2022We like to cite Dorothy Bishop who wrote several years ago: “We know how to formulate and test hypotheses in controlled…
Read More“Serial de-risking”: Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?
June 16, 2022When it comes to novel therapies, positive data has justifiably more value than negative or null data. Indeed, positive data promises…
Read MorePre-study odds
March 14, 2022One of the key themes in the 2005 seminal paper by John Ioannidis “Why most published research findings are false” is…
Read MorePreparing for a journey
February 27, 2022Recently, I went on a trip to a nice hotel with a swimming pool. Upon arrival, standing in the modern room…
Read MoreThe “from-quality-to-system” pendulum
December 20, 2021by Anton Bespalov and Anja Gilis In the dialectics world of the German philosopher Georg Hegel, quantitative changes transform into qualitative…
Read MoreOf peer review and data sharing
November 3, 2021We (preclinical) learn from the Big Brother (clinical). For example, they recognize the risks of bias in study design, conduct and…
Read More“Don’t cut the tree you are sitting on!”
November 3, 2021According to a recent press release from the European parliament, an EU-wide action plan is requested with ambitious and achievable objectives for phasing-out…
Read MoreHow to See More Clearly in the Lab?
June 16, 2021When you can see the world clearly, it’s easy to get where you want to go: You might still get where…
Read MoreAducanumab’s approval is not FDA’s failure, it is our failure
June 16, 2021On June 7, 2021, the FDA approved aducanumab, an amyloid beta-directed monoclonal antibody indicated for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.However, most…
Read MorePseudoreplication in Physiology – more means less
March 30, 2021Many publications leave it to readers to guess whether reported data are based on independent biological replicates (e.g. number of animals)…
Read MoreLet’s discuss reproducibility – the new “Journal for Reproducibility in Neuroscience”
March 30, 2021by Plinio Cabrera Casarotto, PhD,Editor-in-Chief JRepNeurosci The replicability of results is a cornerstone of science. We can only rely on the outcomes…
Read MoreFive rules for evidence communication
December 18, 2020Communicating science is difficult. We were told to tell exciting stories around our scientific discoveries – and it is certainly true…
Read MoreThe Costs of Competitiveness
December 18, 2020In one of the recent Nature issues, there was a piece called “France’s reforms: the costs of competitiveness”. In a nutshell,…
Read MoreA time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together
December 18, 2020Since the seminal paper by Laura Bohn 20 years ago, expectations have built up that biased mu-opioid receptor agonists will deliver what we…
Read MoreViolation of research integrity by selective citation
October 8, 2020We have written repeatedly (LINK, LINK) about the border between the fields of Good Research Practice and Research Integrity being more nuanced…
Read MoreFederal judge invalidates patents – but on the basis of a common statistical mistake
August 17, 2020In a recent case before the US District Court in the District of Nevada, the judge ruled six method-of-use patents to…
Read MoreOur study was conducted according to…
August 17, 2020Over the past several years, more and more journals have revised their guides for authors and included specific instructions on information…
Read MoreThe Embassy of Good Science – An online platform fostering research integrity
March 31, 2020By Iris Lechner The field of research integrity is growing substantially. An increasing number of guidelines and initiatives to foster responsible research…
Read MoreCommentary March 2020
March 31, 2020Comment on Walsh et al. “The statistical significance of randomized controlled trial results is frequently fragile: a case for a Fragility…
Read MoreImproving quality of preclinical academic research through auditing: A feasibility study
March 31, 2020Commentary provided by Claudia Kurreck (Department of Experimental Neurology, Charité -Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany) The performance of audits and assessments is always a…
Read MoreOf lab notebooks and leaders in science
February 1, 2020Good research practices are often said to work against the current success model in science (based on positive results, number and…
Read MoreIs N-Hacking ever OK?
February 1, 2020It has been proposed repeatedly that adding samples based on results of initial experiments is a form of p-hacking (see e.g. new…
Read MoreInstead of replicating studies with problems, let’s replicate the good studies
December 18, 2019A few months ago, the “Reproducibility and Replicability in Science” report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was…
Read MoreAn ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
December 18, 2019We have read with great interest a recent commentary in Nature about scientific research organizations hiring integrity reviewers to vet their manuscripts before…
Read MoreARRIVE 2.0
November 22, 2019A long-awaited revision of the ARRIVE guidelines has finally been published (The ARRIVE guidelines 2019).What impact can we expect from ARRIVE…
Read More“Avoiding the Edge Effect – How to increase reproducibility of in vitro microplate experiments?”
August 12, 2019The randomization of study subjects is commonly discussed for in vivo studies and is in general an accepted practice. However, for…
Read More“Integrity and Trust, a University cannot do Without”
August 12, 2019“Trust us, we are a University”KU Leuven was ranked the most innovative university in Europe for the fourth year in a row! This…
Read MoreInvited Commentary: Qeios – from a powerful writing tool to an immidiate Open Access platform
August 12, 2019By Gabriele MarinelloCo-founder, Qeios We have just started with Qeios the path towards the necessary revolution in research production, quality check and sharing.We…
Read MoreMANILA – A web tool for designing reproducible and transparent preclinical intervention studies
May 22, 2019Teemu D. Laajala1,21: University of Turku, Turku (Finland), Department of Mathematics and Statistics2: University of Colorado, Denver (CO, US), Anschutz Medical…
Read MoreSearching for incentives to do better research
May 22, 2019n a recent commentary, Dorothy Bishop has referred to “the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value…
Read MoreIt takes two to do the dance
May 22, 2019We are often asked what is meant by “quality culture”. As one of our colleagues put it, “quality culture is the…
Read MoreTrial Transparency at European Universities
May 22, 2019We have previously discussed that there are significant efforts to make results of all clinical trials public. And there are already…
Read MoreTax support and incentives for research and development
May 22, 2019In many countries, governments are developing and implementing various mechanisms to incentivize innovative research and development. There is a new mechanism recently announced…
Read Moreprivate forever
May 22, 2019There is growing awareness about the values of preregistered studies or key elements thereof. And there is a growing number of…
Read MorePromoting transparency in preclinical research: preregistration of animal study protocols on www.preclinicaltrials.eu
March 11, 2019Smit NW1, Van der Naald M2,3, Wever KE4, Duncker DJ1,5, Chamuleau SAJ2,3,6 1Netherlands Heart Institute, The Netherlands 2University Medical Center Utrecht, The…
Read MoreBalancing futility and benefit – Is academic research ready for higher research quality standards?
December 20, 2018byAnton Bespalov (PAASP)Adrian G. Barnett (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia)C. Glenn Begley (BioCurate, Melbourne, Australia) *For a condensed version of this…
Read MoreOctopus – a replacement for scientists publishing that rewards good research?”
December 20, 2018After 17 years working in the media I have returned to academia and been shocked to discover so much poor research…
Read MoreOf negative results and dust
November 17, 2018Do studies with negative results have value or not? We hope that majority of our readers would agree that high-quality results…
Read MoreCutting the Gordian knots of industry-academia relationships
November 17, 2018Facing a seemingly intractable problem, we are often moved to go for any fast solution – just not to deal with…
Read MoreGods vs Earth Giants
November 17, 2018by Elena Koustova In the long gone Soviet higher (university-based) education system there were no electives. As aspiring biologists (e.g. natural…
Read More“Research quality is an urgent matter”
September 10, 2018In the March 2018 issue of the newsletter, we have previously discussed that the research rigor & reproducibility discussion starts to…
Read More“How to pick an electronic laboratory notebook?
September 10, 2018Commentary about the Nature-Toolbox article by Roberta Kwok (August 6th, 2018) Laboratory Notebooks (LN) play a key role in research since…
Read MoreElsevier replies to The Guardian
July 9, 2018Hot publications appear not only in Science and Nature. The lay press is also capable of getting their readers excited and…
Read MoreBefore Reproducibility must come Preproducibility
July 9, 2018Many of us ask a question – what can I do to help improve the research data quality? And we are…
Read MoreThe strategy may change, but high quality standards should stay
July 9, 2018Like many of our colleagues in neuroscience, we were surprised to see the recent steps Pfizer took in the field of…
Read MoreIs reading book summaries the same as reading the actual book?
June 6, 2018Books that can be summarized in three sentences (https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries). And one can summarize in a couple of sentences what most movies…
Read MoreHow to grow a healthy lab
June 6, 2018A healthy research environment is fundamental to good science. However, this is an aspect that is rarely discussed. That’s partly because…
Read MoreHow to shift the incentive for researchers from quantity to quality?
June 6, 2018In the current hyper-competitive research environment, scientists feel the constant need to publish novel findings as often and as fast as…
Read MoreCrossing the river
March 30, 2018In the previous issue of the Newsletter, we have already highlighted the recent paper by Bernhard Voelkl et al. from University…
Read MoreEveryone knows mouse research is completely pointless
March 30, 2018We strongly disagree with the title above – however, this statement is borrowed from a recent post on Medical Republic. While…
Read More‘Don’t shoot the dog!’
February 27, 2018Behavioral scientists know very well how to train humans and animals to perform a desired response and how to avoid behaviors…
Read MoreLessons from clinical studies’ (Martin C. Michel)
January 23, 2018At least partly driven by regulatory requirements, technical data quality in clinical studies has markedly improved in the past decades and…
Read MoreThe link between Portfolio Evolution and the Robustness of early phase drug discovery data
December 19, 2017The reproducibility discussion involves everyone who funds, authorizes, supervises, plans, conducts and publishes research. This recent LifeSciVC post showed that lacking research rigor…
Read MoreThe link between Portfolio Evolution and the Robustness of early phase drug discovery data
December 19, 2017The reproducibility discussion involves everyone who funds, authorizes, supervises, plans, conducts and publishes research. This recent LifeSciVC post showed that lacking…
Read More‘How many studies produce negative results?’
November 10, 2017The July issue of the Newsletter mentioned a recent publication by Daniel Benjamin and his colleagues who have analyzed the ability…
Read MoreSimple Randomisation
October 11, 2017A randomization tool for the daily routine The case study in this Newsletter illustrates very well the importance of study subject…
Read MoreBlock randomisation
October 11, 2017In this section we provide information about useful tools for designing and analyzing experiments – instruments and equipment, which we at…
Read MoreNeuroscience has quietly become a hot space for start-ups
September 28, 2017The most recent post in the LiveSciVC blog opens with the statement: “Neuroscience has quietly become a hot space for start-ups”. Does this…
Read More‘Redefine statistical significance’
September 1, 2017A P-value of < 0.05 is commonly accepted as the borderline between a finding and the empty-handed end of a research…
Read MoreTwo neglected aspects when discussing research quality
August 23, 2017Scientific Excellence vs. Research Quality Regulated vs. Non-regulated Scientific excellence is the key to advance science and to develop novel drugs….
Read More‘German Leibniz Institute director Karl Lenhard Rudolph guilty of misconduct’
August 17, 2017On June 15th, 2017, The Leibniz Association, one of the largest networks of non-profit research institutions in Germany, has announced a…
Read MoreAre ‘Secret’ Software Codes part of the reproducibility crisis?
June 7, 2017A commentary based on the two articles by Jiménez et al. and Eglen et al. about the need to publish the…
Read MoreNot allowed to publish everywhere
March 26, 2017The Economist reported (link) that the biggest foundation in the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have a new policy…
Read MoreMeeting Report: Reproducible Research and Registered Reports
March 21, 2017NIHR STATS Group: Laboratory StudiesLondon, 20 March 2017 Invited speakerThe meeting opened with a comprehensive presentation by guest speaker Professor Chris…
Read MoreThe Interplay between Data Quality and Animal Welfare
February 28, 2017The 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement) originating from Russell and Burch (1959) are the guiding principles in preclinical animal research. They…
Read MorePublish or Perish Debate at WCAA
January 30, 2017Together with Rainer Spanagel (Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim) and Henry Kranzler (University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine), Anton…
Read MoreA manifesto for reproducible science
January 11, 2017Manufo et al published an open access manifesto in Nature Human Behavior for reproducible science. This interesting piece summarizes the problems…
Read MoreRanking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
November 26, 2016This recently published survey identifies the most frequent problem in science: sloppy research. The survey was performed among participants of the…
Read MoreMeeting report: Lean Product & Process Development Exchange, Philadelphia Sept 25th – 29th, 2016
November 23, 2016In a mix of seminars and workshops, participants and presenters shared experience and knowledge on the application of the Lean Product…
Read MorePreclinical data reproducibility discussion: Learning from Big Brother
October 24, 2016In recent years, robustness of preclinical data has been increasingly in focus of discussions about the reasons why the success rate…
Read MorePredatory Publishing Threatens the Scientific Enterprise
October 11, 2016Open-access publishing has grown dramatically, with a linear increase in the number of articles published, from about 53,000 in 2010 to…
Read MoreStatement by Martin Michel
September 9, 2016“In God we trust” is minted on each US coin. The evidence-based medicine movement has adapted this to “In God we…
Read MoreIntelligent Effort – Quality in Drug Discovery
July 22, 2016Guest commentary by Dr. Markus HenrichThere is a high demand for quality in daily life. Few of us would actively decide to…
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