The US National Institutes of Health and a number of scientific journals have come up with guidelines aimed at the issue of irreproducible studies, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
The Chronicle's Paul Baskin notes that neither NIH nor the journals have released a draft of the agreement, but Francis Collins, the director of NIH, briefly described a few aspects of it at an advisory committee meeting. The discussion, Collins said, in part revolved around the need to publish articles that point out reproducibility problems in previously published studies.
Collins added that there are other initiatives underway to better understand and deal with the reproducibility issue, Baskin says. For instance, NIH will be meeting with pharmaceutical industry representatives to get their advice and perspective on the issue.